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I, like others, prioritize automatic downloading of transactions. It’s what has kept me on Quicken in spite of the ‘subscription model’ which I hate. But unlike others, I ONLY used it for investment accounts, not for daily expense tracking and reporting.

For over two years now I have been testing in parallel an on-line-only free service, personalcapital.com after seeing it recommended elsewhere. It does both expenses and investments, with automatic downloading after setting up each account, so I have been tracking expenses as well. It has a nice but limited set of charts etc. and allows to reassign expense categories of a line item. Overall, for free it’s great… with a few caveats.

Its ‘catch’ is they would like to sell you on wealth management services. I get phone calls at least weekly (that I just don’t pick up) wanting to have a review of strategies etc. They have not given me any ‘or else’ to stop me using the free tools.

A few things have kept me from dropping Quicken. -On personalcapital you can download a time range of transactions with some filtering, but no way I’ve found to download an investment holdings list, which I use in an excel long-term budgeting / tracking worksheet. -Twice now with one institution, the ‘connection’ quit working for several weeks, with no way to restore transactions from the lost period. -With Quicken, the records are under MY control including historical backup save files.

And of course, the biggie: security. If they get hacked, are all my accounts at risk? No issues so far, and I do keep on top of things weekly on both platforms… but so far I haven’t been able to ‘let go’. This New year, I’ve resolved to try adding the banking institutions to Quicken, and to try Moneydance, and make a choice to keep up only one.

I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s feedback.

Thanks for looking. What do you consider to be the right settings / ‘set up properly’?
I originally did set it up for user accounts (that’s why I created the local users with identical uname/pw as the other local machines)
but that did not work at all (the users specified had no access to the shared folders at all, not even Read).
That is what prompted me to fall back to sharing with the Homegroup.
I don’t see anything about using Workgroup in the settings…