I’m pleased to announce Banktivity 6 is now available! For those that haven’t been following this blog closely, you can check out the Banktivity 6 webpage to learn about some of the great new features we’ve added, like workspaces, tags, quick reports, find and portfolio. All in all, this new version has over 100 new features and improvements!
Minimum Requirements
You need a Mac running macOS Sierra (10.12) or above.
Pricing
Banktivity 6 is $64.99 USD. Customers upgrading from version 5 purchased either directly from IGG Software or the Mac App Store will qualify for upgrade pricing of $29.99 USD. You can download a free 30 day trial and we offer a 90-day money-back guarantee.
Download Banktivity 6 Now
CEO/Founder at IGG Software, Inc.
A California native, Ian's academic background was in biology, botany and environmental studies. He comes to the field of technology purely out of personal passion, and has been writing Mac software for over a decade. He's also an avid birdwatcher, a soccer player, fiddler and an organic gardener. He lives in Oregon with his wife and their two sons.
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Why is my Date, Payee, etc. in BOLD type on my Cash account (what some have been asking for), but not on my checking account registers or credit cards? Some other accounts (Home Depot credit, Morgan Stanley) have a mix of a few bold ones and most plain text.
I don’t see a setting for this anywhere. Using Banktivity Version 6.0.2 (54).
Hmm… I only get bold on new and uncleared, everything else is plain text. I think that was the intention. I have Group NEW and UNCLEARED Transactions (which you can set on an account by account basis). Check that setting on all the accounts where you see the discrepancy.
Thanks, Mario, that’s it. Uncleared transactions. Which is why they were showing on my manually-entered cash tracking account.
Is it possible to include the expense-income timeline in future updates?
This is something we are currently considering. I don’t have a YES or NO answer just yet though.
When will we know the decision?
Without an expense timeline report, I’ll look for another app
I currently use timeline to create P&L reports. It is my most utilized report format. Has this been removed from 6.0? It there another way of creating a month by month P&L (Income/Expense) report?
The v5 Expense Timeline isn’t implemented in v6. You can use do an income/expense report and compare any two months and it is easy to “move” forward/backward in time. But you can’t see 12 months stacked up 🙁
Wow! I see that I am not the only one who misses in version 6 the report on income and expenses month by month and its total at the end that gave us version 5. I say this because I have written more than once to S Banktivity without a clear answer from them on this subject. I came from the old Microsoft Money, and in Bankitityvy version 5 I found a continuity in this subject. Now the solution proposed by Ian Gillespie that “you can use an income / expense report and compare any two months and it is easy to” move “forward / backward in time” does not have the same set utility. For me this is so important that I’m about to move back to version 5, which would be a failure for me.
The same applies to the Portfolio’s reports, in which information about the whole is missing. Information, which also provided version 5. Apart from that here there are also some problems in updating Investment Funds, which does not provide Yahoo finance.
That is really disappointing as the Income/Expense Timeline is such a fundamental reporting format. Even forecasting from past actuals are done with a timeline table. I can’t see me moving to Ver 6 without this. Is there a real probability that this will be reimplemented? How long will you be supporting Ver 5?
Ian,
I agree with the group of users that miss the expense timeline report that was available in version 5 but not version 6. I requested this as soon as I saw it missing after looking at version 6. Your solution is not acceptable for us that love this report. Based on the number of people waiting for the return of this valuable and useful report I would think your programmers would add it back in to version 6. I agree with others that won’t upgrade to version 6 until it is added. I love your program but won’t stay with you unless the expense timeline comes back based on popular demand. Thanks
We exploring how to bring this back with our new reporting layout engine. I can’t promise it yet, but we are actively exploring how to resurrect this report.
Any progress yet on bringing timeline back?
Yes, it should be out in Banktivity 6.2 in the next couple of days!
Thank you very much for the incorporation of the interval reports
Even though my wife and I used Banktivity nearIy every day, I just today (May 27) noticed that there’s a new version! I upgraded without a problem and like the clean look, but I’ve noticed two problems so far:
1. No expense timeline
2. The Portfolio Summary doesn’t include the current share price and instead shows what apparently is the most recent transaction. I don’t need to see transaction history in the Portfolio Summary, but I do need to see the share price.
Nice work overall. I abandoned Quicken when it first abandoned the Mac many years ago and I remain happy with the decision.
The new version looks great however, I really do love the “post” option on the toolbar without having to go into the menu. I have to admit I will miss the lines that are in version 5 that make the register look more like a checkbook. I know the clean interface is “better” but I am old school. Put “post” and “Calculator” in the toolbar and I would be a happy man!
Hi Ian, Team,
Thanks so much for a great update. I really like v 6.0 and it’s features.
One thing I’d love to see would be a calendar view of transactions — It would help, especially in the situations where a transaction is posted on a different day than the physical payment occurred.
Are there any plans to include this as a report or dedicated view?
Thanks so much.
Regards,
Sean
I just updated. Love the new features. I’d like to suggest the following:
1) On budgets: (1) Allow drag-and-drop of cash between envelopes. We were able to do this on Banktivity 5 but no longer on 6. (2) Add feature where we can create new envelopes, say, for certain savings goals, like “Vacation,” so that we can drag-and-drop cash when we like/can. On Banktivity 5, I did this by creating a separate category so that it would generate its own envelope on Budgets, but now on Banktivity 6, these separate envelopes disappears unless a transaction takes place within the Budget’s current specified date range. (If there’s a way around this, please do share advice.) (3) Lastly, please return those old cash-envelope icons!
2) Although when selecting multiple transactions one can Add Tags in bulk, one cannot Remove Tags. Please add this feature.
3) The global search feature is AMAZING. Suggested additional features: (1) Please add the ability to find transactions using quotation marks so that we can find entries with the exact phrase. (2) Please add an “Advanced Search” feature so that we can select between accounts, tags, date range, etc.
What do you think?
I agree that the Global Search is a great feature BUT it needs to do more than find strings to totally replace one of the best features of Smart Account Grouping.
As you suggested the Find should have the ability to filter on components of the data (reconciled, cleared etc), date ranges etc. The searches should be able to be saved as we can now do with reports.
I find losing the ability to easily search UNCLEARED items on a global basis as a showstopper to cutover to B6 fully.
Grouped accounts no longer show transactions (only the total for each account). This is a big miss from version 5 IMO. Primary use case was multiple credit cards grouped, and being able to see transactions of all.
The flexibility of Smart Accounts is something that each User found a different purpose for. IGG needs to consider a way to restore that functionality and I can see the FIND command as the vehicle for that. I suspect the change in the register structure makes the old Smart Account concept impossible, if not get it back in there !! .
Me, too!
OK. well I have a more mundane problem that has resurfaced from much older days when it was iBank, and that the addresses from Contacts are not retrieved even though I have followed the procedure of going to privacy and security,etc. and I see Banktivity 6 is allowed to access Contacts. Doesn’t work. Also pretty well impossible to format the checks for printing at a granularity of 1 pixel. Going back to Banktivity 5 that does not have these issues
Unless I have missed something, there are more bugs in this software than I have time to list. Please tell me why when I add bill expense in the budget selecting custom and enter $25 for each of the 12 months, when I accept it and it goes back too the summary page it lists it as $25 per YEAR. I could list dozens more bugs but lets start with this one.
Hi Nick, thanks for the feedback. Are you using Banktivity 6.0.3? That bug should be fixed.
Hi Ian
Thanks for the quick reply, yes I am using 6.0.3 (56) and the problem still seems to be there?
Hi Can you advise when this bug will be fixed, it was reported back in one of the beta releases and its still is not fixed. This is critical in proper cash management
Nick, if you go to Banktivity > Provide Feedback you send an email in. Can you please send us a screenshot of where you are seeing this, I feel like I’m looking in the wrong area. Thanks!
I have the exact same issue and have just upgraded to 6.04 to try and fix it but its still there. I’m still on a trial version at the moment and think this is a great bit of software, but is pretty buggy for the price.
Hi,
I’ve been a long time user of iBank/banktivity (since v1!) and I’d love to buy and work with B6. But I’m having a problem with the beach ball spinning all the time, especially when I switch from one application (say calculator) and back to B6. Am I the only one having this problem?
Thanks
Hi Joseph,
I believe this is an issue with autosave. Please give this a try to see if it helps:
1. Quit Banktivity 62. Launch Terminal and type (or copy and paste) this:
defaults write com.iggsoftware.banktivity6 IGGAutosavingDelay “600"
3. Hit return
4. Launch Banktivity 6. The autosave timer should now be set to every 10 minutes.
I tried that and the problem persists.
If you get a chance, can you come to our live chat so we can further troubleshoot this issue.
Interestingly enough it seems that B6 has actually resolved this issue for me from B5.
I hope it doesn’t come back. Ian, I spent weeks on this issue on and off with Brian C, who was absolutely fantastic with regards to perseverance and help – much more than I would have expected. If I knew your email I would have sent this kudos directly to you. I’m not sure it with autosave either, that made no real difference to me.
Other comments on the latest release – obviously there’s some changes which won’t please everyone but for me on the whole while there’s some definite backwards usability issues (I can count the number of times I’ll change the currency in my ledger on the finger of no hands – it’s just an extra tab), and format issues (I would like to have more control over the format of the ledger to make it suit my preferences, and I miss the line demarcating the current date from future transactions for examples), I will get used to it. One thing I find strange is that the scheduled transactions etc. is moved to an off-menu Settings area. Any way to put these back into the sidebar?
Anyway – thanks!
I left an enthusiastic message about version 6 when it first came out, but we’ve since noticed several problems:
1. We have auto-update turned off and choose to update manually. Still, we seem to get the spinning beach ball fairly often, usually requiring a force-quit. About 6-8 times we’ve gotten an error message saying we are out of RAM and need to shut Banktivity down. This also requires a force-quit of Banktivity. That message has never occurred on our iMac before we upgraded to Banktivity 6. I’ve loaded “Activity Monitor” before force-quitting and it reports that Banktivity 6 is using 70GB of RAM, even though our machine only has 32GB. We got our iMac last year, and we got the fastest processor available and maxed the memory at 32GB. I don’t think we should be running out of RAM when running Banktivity.
2. There is a bug that allows the little check marks that indicate cleared or reconciled status to disappear at random on the register. Usually if you highlight the transaction, the check(s) will reappear, but they might disappear again later.
3. I still can’t find a way to lock memorized transactions so that they alway pop up the way you want them to rather than the way they did with the last use. We find this very inconvenient.
4. I agree with others that state that the the idea of the new global Find function is nice, but we had actually lost a fair amount of functionality offered by the old smart accounts. Searching using smart accounts was an odd way to accomplish global search, but it actually provided a much more versatile and useful search function. The addition of an ability to control various parameters of the new global search function (such as the ability to switch on or off the grouping of results by account) would solve this problem.
Thanks.
I just downloaded version 6. Seems nice and smooth but… the “income and spending report” doesn’t seem to have the option to include scheduled transactions anymore ?
Not sure why the manual entry on a cash account has been made so much more complicated if you use the keyboard. Before you could TAB to Date, TAB past Type to Payee and TAB to amount and that would be enough for most transactions. Now you have to TAB trough Type, # and Currency to get to Date, then TAB trough Payee, Category (which might be auto-filled through the Payee-selection), Memo and Tags before you can fill in the Amount. Surely it was more logical to have the amount after the Payee and to have Currency and # at the end since they might not need to be filled that often?
I agree – the entry has more steps than before, and also defaults to “withdraw” every time rather than the previously used type.
+1
Ditto
I have to say I am disappointed in a couple aspects of Banktivity 6 that make what I do harder than in version 5. My biggest issue is with the weakness of the investment report:
1) The investment summary doesn’t show the price per share or NAV (ver 5 did). This seems crazy to me.
2) The investment summary doesn’t show % changes for each investment, just the total amount of change (ver5 showed % change, too).
3) I can’t get a detail report of dividends and interest earned – the changes in any investment mix together dividends, purchases, and rebalance transactions. I would need to look them up in the register. The total dividends and interest show, but you can’t click to get a detail report as with ver 5.
4) You can no longer drag and drag from the report to Excel, and have to export a .csv file to open and then copy. This is several extra steps compared to ver 5.
Hopefully version 6.1 will fix some of these things.
Have I understood it correctly to it is not longer possible to sort securities in “Manage Securities” by name but only by symbol?
That is quite a change when you have a lot of managed funds where the symbol starts with the country code and then just have a number, all of which does not tell you much. Surely it must be more logical to sort them according to name?
Though I like the new version a lot and appreciate the new features, may I make some suggestions for the new Securities section? First, if possible, allow sorting of securities by header labels (Symbol/Name, Note, Type, Risk) as in Banktivity 5. Second, for securities that are updated manually, the indicator (-) is much to small to see so it can be made larger, or better yet, connect the indicators by lines. Third, allow manual setting of the price range on the y-axis (auto ranging often magnifies quote variability). Fourth, allow connecting directly with Yahoo to verify a symbol, as was the case for Banktivity 5.
I really do not like the look of the new Banktivity 6. I would like the ability to change the look of my accounts, with lines like a checkbook and maybe green for deposits.
I’d like to second this request. I’d like the ability to change the background color of the categories (as in 5). I have a fairly custom use for Banktivity and having a visual key (color) to identify categories in an account was SOOOO helpful.
Another vote – PLEASE bring back background colors. This and icons for categories KEPT me despite bad recent customer service experiences and bugs from going back to the dark side (AKA Quicken) since they’re finally improving their product.
Have actually decided to remove V6 until they add background colors.. or something better comes around.
One step backwards with Ver 6 is that you are automatically logged out of a bank website after each downloading of transactions. I have multiple accounts in a bank and have to log back in after each download. I also sometimes like to check the bank’s register against the Banktivity to check balances and cleared checks so I have to login again. This is a waste of time and a pain.
I understand that this may have been done for security reasons, but why not make it an option in the preferences. Please consider this change.
Working on a fix for this.
I’d really like to use the new custom monthly budget – but it’s just not working for me. If I try to set monthly amounts, the change is either not saved, or the budget amount is reset to zero.
After one attempt to make this change, the budget report for the current year stopped displaying (just a blank page) although the previous year could be displayed. The report came back after I reset the budget item to annual.
Also, if I edit the budget, expense items are shown in a random order (not sorted by name) which makes them hard to find. Other Income items have a line giving the amounts spent for (variously) January 2015, January 2016, or January 2017 – what’s the point of that?
And, bizarrely, in the Year budget report, one item shows a proportion of the annual amount in the budgeted column (£827.17 instead of £2000) instead of the annual amount like all the rest. It was an item where I’d tried to set a custom budget.
It was worth the upgrade to get searching across all accounts, but the custom budgeting is broken and that doesn’t inspire confidence. I trust it will get fixed soon.
This should be fixed for the next release.
I have been a iBank / Banktivity customer since 2011 and currently use Banktivity 5.
I downloaded and tested Banktivity 6 and was very disappointed and will not upgrade to it.
The loss of timeline reports absolutely prevents me from updating. Plus it played havoc with other reports I rely upon.
The continued loss of report customization (eg subtotals) as you “improve” the product is a real downside.
Your attempt to be “current” and “clean” with your presentation makes reading the displays very difficult. I want my financial data to be functional and not cute. Mindless “simplification” for financials is a very poor idea.
Overall assessment: a dysfunctional cosmetic downgrade to a formerly good product.
Totally agree! Especially subtotals. There is no logic to this. Please fix this.
Please also consider investment capital gains based on average cost, rather than FIFO, for those of us outside the USA.
I am disappointed that Banktivity 6. does not include a facility for dealing with reinvested dividends where no additional units/shares are acquired (quite common in the UK). This means that the ongoing cost of an investment is understated by the amount of retained income. Separate details have to be kept elsewhere so that correct costs are used to calculate Capital Gains/Losses on disposal. Any advice?
1-Please add TAG in Schedule Transaction
2-Please add TAG in mobile app
3-Search case (on top right) not working with centimes amount like 25.34$
4-Please add possibility to customize the tool bar
Thanks
What replaces Smart Accounts in version 6? I have developed a couple of dozen Smart Accounts and find them very useful. I cannot migrate to version 6 from 5 unless I am convinced that there is some sort of replacement for Smart Accounts.
Our intention was for the new Transaction Report to replace smart accounts.
Although v6 looks smoother than v5, I can’t use it without the Income / Expense Timeline report. It’s the single output I use for my transaction logging.
Is there any way this feature can be brought back?
I’ve gone through a long process to upgrade my accounts from 5 to 6, and now I have to downgrade to get the expense timeline reports back.
I have recently upgraded to 6.1 from 5 and what a mess. My entire investment ledgers are way off. The number of shares, and imports from fidelity are completely out of whack. Everything was exact in Banktivity 5! I am not figuring out a plan of how to fix it. I reopened my file in 5 and due to 6 messing it all up, I have an epic disaster. I don’t want to go through 5 years of transactions to fix it, but that’s what it looks like has to happen. Big Red F
Hi Michael, when you upgrade from v5->v6, Banktivity 6 just reads the original v5 file, it doesn’t alter it in anyway. Given this, I don’t see a way for it to be possible for v6 to change your v5 file. Do you have a backup of your v5 file? We do force the accounts’ running balances to be recalculated during migration. This could result in balance change between v5 and v6, but it would ultimately mean your v5 file has errors in it. I hope you can make it to our live chat to get some more detailed help.
Ian, thanks for the reply. I did contact live support and sent them screen shot’s of some of the problems. I asked them if they would get back to me on the following discrepancy; when a security posts a dividend or capital gain and that dividend is automatically reinvested, it does not subtract the cost of the security purchase from your balance. I had to go back and manually change all security reinvestments to buy instead of dividend in order to correctly maintain the proper balance. I am working through some other glitches, and will post them as appropriate. My balances and transactions were all correct prior to the upgrade, so I am not sure what caused the problem. It’s painstaking going back one statement at a time and verifying all information.
Please please please bring back the expense timeline! It’s such a key report to review!
IGG,
It would be nice if you could attach a monthly statement to a monthly reconciliation. I have been attaching my monthly statement to the last transaction of the month. It would be clean if during the reconcile process in the statements tab you could attach your statement. If that is possible now, I haven’t figured it out. 🙁
Thank you very much for the incorporation of the interval reports
I’m currently using IBank 4. If I decide to upgrade to version 6, will my old data transfer (smoothly) into the new version? Also will the cost be reduced because I’ve purchased a earlier version?
Hi. I love Banktivity 6 for Mac but I am frustrated with one feature. I buy custom checks and custom envelopes with an address window and in previous software been able to print so that I can save the time of manually writing the address (slower and not to mention looks really weird to have a printed check with handwritten address). In Banktivity I can not select the address from contacts if there are more than two for an entry, or edit how I want the address to look before I print…and worse, if there is no address it will still print the name of the payee in the address field so there is this random name just hanging out on the check. Can you not allow editing of the address before printing (have an address field for each check or an address book within Banktivity?), or have more than one custom format for printing, or at the very least have it print nothing if there is no address for a contact? Printing and paying checks each month is one of the most time consuming tasks; I look for software to make it easier and to not have to print and then hand write an address on a check. Any chance you can fix this for next edition or update? Thanks.