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I like Mint.com's user interface and functionality, but don't trust onlines to hold my banking information. I don't think they are malicious, but holding so many bank accounts in one place makes them an attractive target for hackers.

Are there any Desktop applications that are equivalent to Mint.com? It could be free or commercial, so long as it has a good user interface and functionality.

UPDATE: The application should run under Windows and contain the following features:

  1. Ability to download transactions from banks.
  2. "Where is my money going?" Categorize spending, aggregate the information and display a summary in a meaningful format.
  3. Month by month budgeting.
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  • @ChrisW.Rea, updated.
    – Gili
    Oct 14, 2013 at 20:44
  • 1
    @CraigW, please convert this to an answer.
    – Gili
    Oct 14, 2013 at 20:46

3 Answers 3

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Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_software, in particular the rows with a market focus of 'personal'. This is probably one of the more complete lists available, and shows if they are web-based (like Mint) or standalone (like Quicken or Microsoft Money).

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A desktop application that has the same features (although as already stated, nothing will be identical but if you are looking for functionality then certainly there will be) and pretty simple to use was Microsoft Money, however, Microsoft stopped supporting it with newer versions and while the existing versions will work, I still use mine, there will be no future updates. I like the interface, its simple to use and has all the features you want. They abandoned it in favor of Intuit's Quicken but personally I am not a fan of the Quicken interface.

They still had a more extensive and probably too much for the average user application called Office Accounting, but they abandoned future updates and supports on that in favor of Intuit's Quickbooks. Again, I am not a fan of the interface but they are very feature rich including invoicing and payroll, again overkill for the average user. They still have the Small Business Accounting in the form of Microsoft Dynamics, but that is utterly overkill for personal use.

I generally don't trust online or cloud based accounting solutions like Mint or even Quicken online because I don't trust my information security to some third party without knowing how they are securing it and what will happen to me if/when they are leaked due to breach. So I like to keep everything local to myself and that's a good move for you, you should do that. It seems at the moment the market standard without much competition is Quicken for personal use and Quickbooks for small business. I would recommend you start with Quicken and if your needs increase in the future, you can easily transfer into Quickbooks to scale up as they are fully compatible with each other.

Check it out here and compare their products to see what works best for your needs.

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If you're happy manually downloading transaction files from your bank and importing them into your desktop application, try You Need A Budget 4. It hits all three of your requirements.

Here are the details about how to import from your bank

I've been using YNAB for a few months now and am very impressed with it. It was cheap and it syncs to my mobile phone for on-the-go money management via Dropbox.

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    +1 (+100, if I could) my wife and I love YBAB. We've been using it for years. May 10, 2014 at 5:41
  • I only discovered it last Christmas - it was about £7.50 on the Steam sale. I can quite honestly say that it's changed my life. May 12, 2014 at 14:33

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