AceMoney vs Quicken: AceMoney Software Price and Review

AceMoney is better on price and Quicken is better on almost everything else. AceMoney costs $44.95 once with future updates included, which suits a household with a few checking, savings and card accounts. Quicken Classic connects to far more banks, prints checks, pays bills and, on Business & Personal, produces tax schedule reports. Choose by how you get transactions in.

If your bank still offers Direct Connect, or you are comfortable downloading a QIF or OFX file once a month, AceMoney handles the bookkeeping side of a household ledger well: budgets across more than 100 built in categories, bill reminders, loan and mortgage tracking, investments and multi currency accounts. If you expect accounts to update themselves every morning with no effort, test that during the trial before deciding AceMoney is enough.

AceMoney costs $44.95 in US dollars for a license, paid once, and MechCAD says the purchase includes all future updates. A license arrives by email as a code that unlocks the trial installation, so there is nothing to ship. Technical support is included for two years, and a 2 Year Support Plan extends it for $19.95.

That support plan is worth understanding before you skip it. MechCAD says it covers license recovery if you lose your code and data recovery if you password protect a file and forget the password or the file becomes corrupted. For a ledger holding years of household history, $19.95 every two years is cheap insurance. MechCAD accepts credit cards and cryptocurrency at checkout.

Yes. AceMoney is a one time purchase of $44.95, and MechCAD's FAQ states that buying a license gives you free lifetime upgrades to future versions, released several times a year. There is no annual renewal and no feature that switches off. The only optional recurring cost is the $19.95 support extension after two years.

That makes AceMoney the purest buy once model among the desktop Quicken alternatives we have compared. Moneyspire is a one time license too, but keeping its bank sync and cloud sync running past the first year means buying the next version for $49.99. Moneydance sells its connected services as a separate add on. The breakdowns are on our Moneyspire vs Quicken pricing page and in Moneydance vs Quicken.

Partly, and it is worth testing before you buy. MechCAD's downloads page offers an AceMoney for macOS build and a separate build for Mac OS X 10.11 to 10.14, while its FAQ says AceMoney "is not a native Mac application" and describes running it under emulation or virtualization. Install the trial on your own Mac first.

If you are on a current Mac and want software built for it, AceMoney is not the strongest option. Our roundup of personal finance software for Mac covers native choices. One Mac specific warning applies to anyone leaving Quicken: Quicken for Mac does not export QIF, so moving a Mac Quicken file into AceMoney is harder than moving a Windows one.

Yes, if your bank supports Direct Connect. AceMoney uses the OFX protocol to download transactions and the vendor says it can reach about 4,000 institutions, naming American Express, Discover, Chase and Citi as examples. Web Connect is not supported for online downloads. If Direct Connect is unavailable, download a QIF, OFX or QFX file from your bank's website and import it.

Check this for every account you care about during the 30 day trial. MechCAD's FAQ notes that some banks need you to call and activate Direct Connect, that activation can take up to 24 hours, that some banks charge a small monthly fee, and that error codes 2000 and 15500 usually mean the service is not enabled or the credentials are wrong. Bank coverage is the most common reason people who leave Quicken end up going back.

AceMoney imports Quicken data through QIF files rather than opening a Quicken data file directly. On Quicken for Windows you export each account to its own QIF file, create matching accounts in AceMoney, and import each file into its account. AceMoney also imports OFX, OFC and QFX files, plus CSV in a fixed nine column layout.

Budget time for transfers. MechCAD's FAQ explains that when you import several QIF files, each transfer between two of your accounts appears in both files, so it arrives twice, and there is no automatic fix. Its suggested method is to import accounts one at a time and delete the duplicate transfers as you go. The Quicken side of the job is covered step by step in our guide to exporting a QIF file from Quicken. One more trap: if dates come in as today's date, set AceMoney's date format to MM/DD/YY in International Settings and import again.

The only difference is the number of accounts. AceMoney Lite supports two accounts, and the full AceMoney license supports unlimited accounts. Both use the same file format, interface and features, so a file started in Lite opens in the full version after you buy a license, with no conversion step.

In practice two accounts means one checking account and one credit card, and most households outgrow that as soon as they add savings, a second card or a mortgage. If you are comparing AceMoney with Quicken at all, you almost certainly have more than two accounts, so the $44.95 license is the product to evaluate.

No. MechCAD's FAQ states that AceMoney cannot print checks and does not support making online payments to banks or other financial institutions. Its scheduler adds recurring transactions to your registers and shows when bills are due, but you pay them through your bank. Quicken Classic prints checks, pays bills through your bank where the bank supports it, and adds its own BillPay service on Premier and above.

AceMoney keeps your data in a local file on your own computer, in a password protected .amj format, rather than on a vendor server. MechCAD warns against downloading "registered" copies from other websites and says licenses are only delivered by email after purchase. Download the installer from mechcad.net and nowhere else.

The same security design creates one practical catch when you change computers. MechCAD says an .amj file only opens on another machine if you enabled Allow Multi-user access under Tools, Options, Password on the computer where the file was created. If you reinstall Windows or your computer fails before you do that, you have to send the file to MechCAD support to reset it. Turn that option on the day you start.

Not directly from either program. QuickBooks does not import QIF in any edition, and AceMoney lists HTML, text and CSV exports rather than QIF. The clean route runs through Quicken: export the business or rental accounts from Quicken for Windows as QIF, convert that QIF to a QBO Web Connect file, and import it into QuickBooks Online or Desktop.

This is the step to plan before you cancel Quicken, not after. If part of your ledger is a side business, a rental or anything an accountant will eventually want in QuickBooks, export those accounts to QIF while you still have Quicken installed, because once the history lives in AceMoney the documented way out is CSV. Upload the QIF to the converter at the top of this page and you get a balanced QBO file with stable transaction IDs, so importing the same file twice will not double post. The QuickBooks side is covered on QIF to QuickBooks Online, and the full move is on Quicken to QuickBooks Online. A free account converts three files of up to 100 transactions each, so you can check the import before choosing a plan.

Yes. MechCAD's FAQ says new versions are released several times a year and all are included with a license, its downloads page carries current Windows and macOS builds, and it offers the AceMoney Receipts companion app for iOS, Android and web, which scans receipts and pairs with the desktop program.

Weigh that against the size of the company. AceMoney is a small vendor product, and parts of its help content are old. That matters less for a program that stores your data locally and keeps working without a server, which is exactly the reason many people choose it, but it is a reason to keep your own backups and to export a CSV copy of your registers now and then.

AceMoney is the cheapest at $44.95 with all future updates included and suits a simple Windows household ledger. Moneyspire at $59.99 runs natively on Mac, Windows, Linux and Chromebook and exports QIF. Moneydance has strong investment tracking and a documented QIF export. If you might ever need to hand data to another program, favor one that exports QIF.