iBank for iPhone

Sync works flawlessly for us.

I have used iBank for Mac for years, and it is a very good application. However, the syncing with the iPhone app is unreliable at best and IGG Software doesn't seem serious about their cloud sync solution since it is still in beta. Therefore I can't recommend the iBank for iPhone.

A word of advice: if you plan to use this on iPhone or iPad only it may be OK. Just painfully slow. But DO NOT TRY TO USE THIS WITH THE DESKTOP VERSION OF IBANK. The auto-sync on the iOS version regularly overwrites transactions already entered and reconciled on the desktop version. The developer must give the option to stop Direct Access syncing from happening on iOS! Other than that MAJOR issue, this is a full-featured personal finance app. Maybe too full featured. It is incredibly slow. Typing entries in the ledger actually slows down the iPhone keyboard so that letter keys get frozen part-way through typing and you can only type one letter every 2-3 seconds. The last version was basic, not great, but at least it worked simply and did what I wanted to do on a phone. This new version is just awful. They try to cram an entire financial management application onto the phone and as a result nothing's works very well: - This app is painfully slow and buggy. Whether it’s the slowness of its operation and syncing, or simply bugs in the code, it spontaneously quits all the time. When it runs, every single operation takes FOREVER. - There are no user configurable options in this, so it does all sorts of things that I simply don’t want done on my phone. It attempts to sync with all my online financial accounts via Direct Access, which I only want to happen with the desktop version of iBank. There is no way to stop the iPhone from updating accounts as well, and it introduces all sorts of bugs into your data file. Using the iPhone app, every account gets both duplicated transactions and missing transactions, because it spontaneously deletes transactions that were entered on the desktop. They haven’t built into the mobile version any of the intelligence that exists on the desktop: credit card transactions don’t have Import Rules that consistently format them, transactions that match already entered ones appear as “New” instead of “Match”. What’s the point of Cloud Sync if they try to do online updates both via the phone AND the desktop? With both devices updating the file, there are constant inconsistencies and data corruption problems being introduced into my accounts. - The transaction types in the phone version don’t match the available transaction types on the phone, so if you use both you basically have to ignore all the transaction types available on the desktop except Deposit and Withdrawal. It’s as if the two apps are made by different companies who don’t know how to work together. - There is no ability to order accounts and set primary and secondary ones as there was on the prior version. I now have to wade through dozens of accounts just to find the few that I actually care about when using the app on my phone. There are so many other problems, but I won’t go into them all. It would be nice if IGG had a forum online to address these issues, but they have just a few support documents online that don’t get to the real problems. They are little more than marketing documents. iBank in its desktop and mobile versions is unfortunately the best financial software on the Mac, but that just shows how sorry the whole software category is. IGG seems well intentioned, but all their software is slow, rough around the edges, and is always two steps forward one step back in every version. I’d love to see them get it right.

The old version of the app was solid and straightforward to use. They've made minor improvements in this version as time has gone on, but until they implement some of the usability and workflow features I've requested a while back (that were present in the old version, incidentally), I can't highly recommend this app...especially for the price. Very frustrating.

I use iBank. I like iBank. I have two complaints - mobile app takes forever to sync and there is no clear progress bar. The old version told you exactly the transaction count that was being synced. Other Request is there needs to be an option to Display Current Balance and Ending Balance. Only shows Ending Balance.