10/10/2011

Modeless Liquid Ledger Personal Finance Software (Mac) Review

Modeless Liquid Ledger Personal Finance Software (Mac)
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The only reason I bought Liquid Ledger was that Quicken for Macintosh got such horrible reviews on Amazon, but now I wish I'd taken my chances. I was converting from a PC to Mac and needed financial software to take the place of Quicken. My experiences with Quicken for Windows were all fairly positive; however, with LL, it's been nothing but frustration and headaches.
First off, it didn't want to play nice with my exports from Quicken, so I had to try over and over to find a format that it would accept, and even then things didn't translate cleanly. Beyond that initial frustration with getting my existing data loaded, I just find Liquid Ledger to be very unfriendly and not at all intuitive - things are not grouped logically under the menus, nor are the functions named in a way that makes a lot of sense. I understand that most software comes with a learning curve, but I'm a pretty sharp guy with a good deal of computer savvy (been working with computers and various operating systems professionally for a good 16 years now), and I find LL confounding.
My biggest gripe about it is the bugs. For one, things rarely sort correctly. If I click on a column header, I expect it to sort my data by the values in that column, and clicking the header again should reverse the sort. However, with LL, if I make a change in a column (e.g. clicking the "cleared" box next to a transaction) and then immediately try to sort on that column, the sort is incorrect; it is as though it does not recognize the modification I just made, and the only remedy is to sort by ANOTHER column first, then sort on the column I originally wanted. UNACCEPTABLE!!!
If I'm on the last transaction that's displayed in the window and tab off the last field, the cursor jumps to the very FIRST transaction. NOT what I would want or expect - how about just going back to the first field of the current transaction???
The most frustrating bug is the disappearing details pane. LL allows you to sub-itemize a transaction in a separate pane on the main window by entering individual line item transactions that comprise the main transaction. I most often use this for tracking transactions on my Visa credit card - I'll have one line item for the total bill, and the details pane allows me to record the individual purchases separately, which I can then use to reconcile my statement when it comes in. So, the details pane works fine, until I decide to toggle to another window or open application. When I do, the details pane is usually gone when I return to LL, and the only way I have found to recover it is to QUIT LL and restart it. Not only does the pane disappear, but the scroll bar on the right edge of the window goes away also, and the transactions generally run past the bottom of the page. In other words, the application becomes all but unusable until I restart it.
Also, I've got years worth of data, but LL absolutely bogs down unless I restrict the transactions to just a month or two. I've never had any issue with this in Quicken.
The "help" within the application is anything but helpful. There are plenty of descriptions of the sorts of things you can ostensibly do with LL, but just try and figure out how to actually accomplish any of those things! The procedural descriptions, if they exist at all, are very well-hidden. The only available customer support appears to be "Online Support Forums," which I take to be a cop-out on the part of Modeless. Let the customers gripe to each other about the buggy product, rather than actually do anything to fix it. The bugs I've noticed are pretty major - and I've submitted my share of bug reports - but in the five months I've used this piece o' c*** there hasn't been a single software update available.
It doesn't surprise me that there's only one other review of this product at the time of this writing. Perhaps LL's reputation is well-known and more people are opting to deal with Quicken for Mac. I certainly wish I had!!!

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Liquid Ledger is a personal accounting solution that can help you analyse monthly spending and find cash you never knew you had. It offers a comprehensive set of accounting tools to help you track banking and credit card activity, balance your chequebook, setup reminders to pay bills, generate reports and graphs, and more. With modern features such as Multiple Currency support, the ability to import account activity downloaded from financial institutions, and over a dozen time-saving features, a few minutes each week is all it takes to start feeling more confident about how you manage your money.

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