Long-Time User with More Recent Problems

I’ve been using MoneyWiz for several years and overall have been quite pleased. I’ve given it 4 stars even though I’m about to list a whole series of problems. But those problems are focused on one area of the product and can be avoided. I’ve looked at a lot of competitive products and still prefer MoneyWiz over anything else.

But with v2, Online Banking was introduced. I really liked the idea of being able to bring up MoneyWiz and have it automatically download and categorize my transactions, so I signed up for a year subscription. I did this based on the quality of the previous version and the responsiveness of the MoneyWiz team to problems. Sadly, I was very disappointed with Online Banking. There were numerous problems, some of which still exist. Here’s what you need to be aware of:

The download-and-import process uses different code from Online Banking. If you import your transactions from both sources for comparisons you may get different information in Payee and Description fields. My experience is the download-and-import process is much more complete, accurate, and useful.

You may not get check numbers imported through Online Banking that do show up in download-and-import.

Auto-categorization of Online Banking can be very poor. The quality varies by source - Yodlee or Saltedge - and by information from the financial institution. Categorization via download-and-import is much better and more consistent. Also, Online Banking will automatically generate a new category at the top level of the hierarchy if it doesn’t think your transaction matches any of the categories. If you’ve created your own categorization hierarchy, this can really mess you up. It doesn’t let you know it’s done this so unless you carefully inspect each new transaction or carefully review your categories after import there’s no way to know. Then you need to manually edit and correct both the categories and transactions. This can be a royal pain. The good news is with v2.4 it’s planned to give you options to control this better by account.

I had numerous other problems with Online Banking, such as expense transactions coming in as income, vice-versa, sometimes getting duplicate transactions, sometimes duplicates with both income and expense transactions, etc. I worked a long time with the MoneyWiz support team and I was very pleased at their responsiveness for getting many of these problems resolved. But ultimately the autocategorization problems caused me to turn off Online Banking. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a refund for the subscription from MoneyWiz, who sent me to Apple. Apple reviewed my request and refused it, even when I provided the very long string of emails documenting the problems. Apple sent me back to MoneyWiz who said they wouldn’t refund either all or the unused portion of my subscription. This left me both frustrated and disappointed.

All that said, there is a great deal of MoneyWiz that’s very, very good - thus my 4 star review. I wish they’d look at a different report printing engine that gave us more control of the formatting. Reports generally use very large fonts and waste lots of paper space. A few other minor complaints similar to that.

PAlterBoy about MoneyWiz 2 - Personal Finance