Greetings everyone. It’s been a while since I’ve given an update on the development of Banktivity, so I’m here to remedy that. First, I want to give a quick recap of some of our accomplishments of 2021, and second, talk about some of the features and improvements we are working on for 2022.
Annual Summary
Last year marked our first full year since we moved to subscription in late 2020. In 2022 we released 20 updates to Banktivity which included over 160 new features and bug fixes. You can see all of the details of our releases, here.
One other significant event in 2021 was the (temporary) loss of downloading cryptocurrency exchange rates. When our service provider unexpectedly dropped support for the few symbols that worked, we decided to bring the feature back better than ever with the release of Banktivity 8.7. In January 2022, 8.7 went live to the public with support for over 300 cryptocurrency prices in USD, EUR, GBP and more. We also improved finding the right symbol to use when fetching prices. For the far majority of them, it is just the code of the cryptocurrency (BTC, ETH, DOGE, etc.), and then make sure your security is of type, “Cryptocurrency” in Banktivity.
The Roadmap
The goal for 2022 with regards to our roadmap is pretty simple: continue to make small incremental improvements and bug fixes while simultaneously working on larger features that we will deliver late this year.
This, in turn, is guided by a few overarching goals and principles. First, our long (long!) term goal is to have very close to feature parity between iOS and macOS. I say, “very close to” because there are some fine details in there for some features that don’t make sense on certain platforms but, suffice to say, “feature parity” is the end goal. Second, we continue to strive to implement features we know our customers want. This list has a long tail and we try to implement the most requested ones first. The last over-arching principle is we strive to have a healthy codebase. Banktivity has been around for a long time and we hope to be around well into the future. Any codebase that is going to evolve with technology needs continuance cleanup and maintenance to make sure we don’t take on too much technological debt.
So now that we have a sense of some of the goals and driving principles of our roadmap, let’s dive into some of the specifics we are working on in 2022!
Reports on iOS
For almost as long as we’ve had our iOS apps our customers have wanted to see their reports on these devices. I’m happy to announce that this feature is well under development. We actually plan to roll this feature out in stages. First, we will release our three most popular reports: income and expense, net worth and payee. These reports should be fully functional, e.g. tap to drill down, edit the parameters, sync back to Mac and so on. Once we get those released, we will focus on some of our other reports. I also want to mention that we are trying to do this the right way by refactoring some of our code so that Mac and iOS will be using a shared library for more of the calculations.
Document Pruning
Many of our customers have been with us for a long time (over 15 years) and we know many that moved to Banktivity recently might have imported an old Quicken file with a long history of old transactions and accounts. Some customers like these massive amounts of data at their fingertips, but for many of us (me included), we just don’t need the extra “bloat” of my finances from say about 2005 to 2020. So we are planning on introducing a feature that allows you to spin off a new document from a specified date and just carry forward the information from that date. In addition to keeping things tidy, it can also improve performance.
UI Scaling on Mac
For about as long as Banktivity has been around, we’ve received requests from people that want the font size to be larger on Mac. While we consistently use font sizes recommended by Apple, we recognize that some people want to scale things up, similar to how you can increase the content size in Safari by pressing ⌘ + and decreasing by pressing ⌘ –
If you didn’t know about these useful shortcuts, you can try them now while you are reading this. Pretty nifty, right?!
I’m happy to announce that very similar functionality is coming to Banktivity. With this new feature, you’ll be able to scale up or down the content area to the right side of the sidebar. We will even implement the same easy keyboard shortcut. Fonts, graphs and UI widgets in the main content area will scale up.
Other Work
Behind the scenes, there is ongoing internal work to make sure our servers continue to run smoothly. We are also making some improvements to subscription management so that is easier for customers to update payment methods and in general, make for a better experience.
We know that Apple will almost certainly announce new versions of iOS, iPadOS and macOS this summer at WWDC, so we are also scheduling some time for our developers to make sure Banktivity runs great on all three OSes when they ship, presumably in fall 2022.
We have a long list of features we want to implement and I know that for some of you, the feature you are most excited about might not be on this list! I wish I could please everyone at once, but we are human after all (although our team is pretty stellar!).
I also want to say, these are our goals. Unexpected things occur, fires need to be put out, so please take this as our aspirational roadmap, not something set in stone.
- Banktivity 9.5 and Monthly Subscriptions - October 18, 2024
- Coming soon: Banktivity 9.5 - July 19, 2024
- Continuing Investments in Direct Access - February 26, 2024
Awesome to hear about archiving on Banktivity. When I moved to Ibank in 2012 I thought that was a limiting factor but I am converted to a big file and the benefits of all your transactions are at your fingertips. Good to know this feature will be there when I inevitably need to start pruning the file.
Nice idea about the font adjustment, all these usability features make a huge difference to day to day use. The transaction duplicate on the register has been a big hit for me. Keep up the good work. If you ever bring back Quicklook (space bar) on an attachment, that will be bliss !
So good to hear that reports are coming to iOS!! I’ll be able to really start using Banktivity on my iPad day to day. Hoping that the Forecast report will be added soon after the initial three… cashflow forecasting is really important to those of us that have irregular incomes & expenses.
Keep up the good work, Ian & Team.
This forecast report is critical to me – I cannot use the iOS app w/o it.
Yet, it is November 2022 and I do not see any reports in my updated iOS Banktivity App.
Am I missing something?
We have released reports for iOS, yet. And in full disclosure, the Forecast report isn’t included in the initial set of supported reports.
Thank you for the updates and a preview of future changes to the software. I have been using Banktivity for many, many years and upgraded to the subscription service in late 2021. Unfortunately, I have been beset with glitches since then. While the product support team is responsive, they have not been able to fix a single issue I have had. I have been emailing back and forth with them for over 2 months and nothing is resolved. I have never had such problems with Banktivity, and I am quite disappointed about this. I hope you will work to do more with your software technicians, so they can actually help longtime users such as myself.
I appreciate the honest feedback. I’ll see what I can do.
I have had a similar experience. I am unable to use the cloud backup feature. After unsuccessfully trying multiple suggestions from the very responsive support representative, the ultimate solution would have been to send my file to IGG which I declined to do. I’ve been using iBank then Banktivity for many years and overall have been happy.
I continue to have problems with Direct Access with 2 of my principal financial institutions. I get occasional emails saying the problems are under investigation but this has been going on since last October. Can you please comment on advances in the Yodlee software and if some institutions simply will not work they should be removed from the list of DA institutions.
Issues with Direct Access connections are our number one reason people come to support. Some institutions work great, especially those that have moved to Open Banking, but ones that are screen-scraped tend to be more inconsistent. Yodlee and Salt Edge control the list of financial institutions they claim to support and we present that list to the end-user. We do massage it a little, but we typically rely on them to keep the ‘master list’. We do have some more support reps in training now and we are reshuffling some staff so that we have a single person responsible for working with the “chronic” DA issues. I can’t promise anything because I don’t know the particulars or your situation, but please know we are trying to make the experience better for everyone.
Please make this a priority. Even if we could drop back that would be helpful. I have one Schwab account that works fine because I didn’t convert. The other hasn’t synced since October.
Please get Stifel working . I connect but nothing is downloaded I am tired of entering transactions manually
I agree with this. When my connection to USAA broke last fall, it ironically caused me to use Banktivity less often and with less rigor because the chore of manually entering all of my transactions is such drudgery that I just don’t want to do it. And manually downloading and importing the transactions is a disaster because it imports a lot of garbage transactions or the amount fields are confusing and I don’t map them correctly.
While the DA connectivity issues are a chronic problem, they do usually get fixed. But this USAA outage has been quite terrible and leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Thanks for the update Ian. Looking forward to reports on iOS!
Thank you very much for the update. I do understand why many will find the push towards parity with iOS so desirable.
However, I worry when this leaves existing reported bugs unresolved. Particularly when these are fundamental to the operation of the software. I (and others I know) have reported several, in the budgeting module (as an example):
1) With odd behaviour in the budget bars and in particular the diamonds
2) The way in which the Envelope target calculations go awry when trying to fund for a mix of monthly and annual schedules
3) Starting balances on an account do not appear as available for envelope funding unless deleted and then reentered as a specific transaction.
4) If a regular amount is not budgeted in a category, that category is not showing up as available for envelope fill.
And so on …..
Agreed Paul. I would add there is a critical bug on iOS where the app loads with data and text missing, and transactions can’t be entered. This has been open for more than a year with no updates or progress. I’d prefer to see this prioritised over new features.
We will investigate these! Always good to hear about some of the specific issues/bugs people are having.
Thanks Ian. See ticket VS95O.
This is our nemesis bug right now.
I have been a quicken user for a long time until recently I have been with Banktivity for a year now and I love it. The intense reporting is amazing. These updates are going to be awesome and I am excited for the future of this program. Keep up the great work!
While you have the hood up on the UI, is there any chance you can make category and payee management a little easier? You can’t merge payees for example (and you have quite good payee reporting) and it’s really hard to move categories around because the filtering is very blunt. For example if I search for a top level category, it only shows that rather than all its subcategories, which is really useful for making changes.
On the topic of Payee management, please add the ability to remove schedule from a memorized payee without deleting the payee form the database.
I had a huge file in iBank with financial data from ancient times to present. I apparently started a new file (titled “2022 onward” on the same account at the beginning of this year. When I use Time Machine to go back to my iBank file in previous years, the data ALWAYS starts at the beginning of this year like my new file. I thought I’d be able to recover old data from, say, 2021 or earlier, yet it’s gone even on older file in Time Machine! Why?
This sounds like something specific to Time Machine. I don’t have a good answer for you.
I appreciate the update. Unfortunately and for what it’s worth, it seems as if the larger changes in the works are not ones that would do much for me. I use Banktivity almost exclusively on my iMac, so I’m not too interested in the iPhone & iPad upgrades. I’m also not interested in pruning my documents–I like to have everything available in the app, which brings me to my one request: I’d really like to see an option to search the entire database, including transactions in unused, hidden accounts. I’ve often been baffled by the fact that a search doesn’t turn up a transaction until I realize that it must be in a hidden, closed account.
+1 – I don’t hide unused accounts for this very reason. I think an optional flag to INCLUDE would be a very good outcome. I carry about 12 accounts that are dead but still need their transactions.
We implemented showing search results for inactive accounts for the next update.
We’ve added this for the next release. Search results in closed inactive accounts will appear at the bottom with a header like this, (Inactive)
Thank you!
Ian, I beg you!
Add the Salt Edge Brazil to the beta DA2.
(BTW I have some relatives which I had to recommend Moneywiz only because they don’t have the patience to do by hand)
I appreciate that everyone has their own top feature request. For me, I remain on Banktivity 7 and I really want to upgrade to Banktivity 8 but for one glaring missing feature: the ability to allow multiple currencies in a single investment account.
As a Canadian, I require multiple currency support because I have both US and Canadian investments. So upgrading to Banktivity 8 requires me to subscribe at the highest tier. This is expensive, but I would be willing to do it if the multiple currency support includes the ability to include investments with different currencies in a single investment account. My brokerage account can do this, so why does Banktivity require investments in an account to use the same currency as that account?
Until this feature is offered, I’m remaining on Banktivity 7. I want to give you my money, but only when the added cost of being an international customer is worth it.
Mike, as a fellow Canadian user then I believe that Banktivity 8 already has this feature. I have securities/balances in multiple currencies – including CAD and USD. Banktivity 8 does sync CAD and USD denominated balances/securities into distinct accounts, rather than a consolidated multi-currency investment account, but I don’t see how this would impair use case.
As a Brit, I totally agree with you. I have to have individual investment accounts in five different currencies and it is a real PITA!
From a Canadian perspective it would be nice to have the ability to calculate average cost for security holdings in accordance with Canadian tax as opposed to US tax instead of having to recreate separately.
Can’t imagine what it takes to keep up w a new OS or IOS every year. Kudos to you guys!
Long time ibank am
No bankivity user!
Hi Ian, I live in Australia and have been a Banktivity etc user since 2009. From those early days, B was steadily improved and became the gold standard for personal financial apps on the MacOS platform. However, gradually the improvements became less relevant to me, and B5 offered me more than I needed. Furthermore the change to a subscription business model was expensive for me, and offered no real value since many of the improvements seemed to be addressing your large US market. So regrettably I’m not renewing my subs this time. I expect to be using B8 forever though, and ask you not to do anything which would preclude this. I also suggested in a letter to you 12 months ago that an annual subs of around $20, perhaps with fewer accessible features, would be attractive to me, but can appreciate that this could be difficult to set up. Nevertheless I wish you and your team every success in the future, and thank you sincerely for bringing Banktivity to the Apple community. Kind regards, Rob Fincher
1. Allow auto scheduling of investment transactions (eg. Dividend).
2. Add a more powerful global search that allows filtering by different criteria, eg. Tag account etc
Thanks for the update! I love Banktivity and use it all the time. That said, I have two things: The software still remains a little unstable. I’ve had it crash on me several times recently as I’ve made lots of changes. But, there are fewer crashes than a year ago. Second, the net worth report (aka balance sheet) needs fixing. Balance sheets have a formal format that is not being followed, and if this year’s liability account balance is zero (e.g., I paid off the loan), it moves the account up to the assets and shows last year’s comparative amount as a negative asset. That’s just not workable. I have to create my own balance sheet in a spreadsheet just using the figures from the Banktivity report. It’s also missing the contra asset type of account (like depreciation). But, I would totally recommend Banktivity to anyone needing a home financial software.
I’m still here crossing my fingers for New Zealand security quotes to return to Banktivity. 🙂
Greetings to NZ!
The reporting function is beyond superb! For those individuals who know how to manipulate data, Banktivity is a gold mine! At tax time, Banktivity saves my sanity. I would ask for some small improvements: (1) add page numbers to reports, (2) ensure that a complete audit trail capability exists by including various data elements including transaction memos, etc., and (3) perhaps report titles in addition to any existing ones.
IN SHORT, TO USE A CALIFORNIA PHRASE: BANKTIVITY IS BEYOND AWESOME!!!
I’ve seen some great changes with Banktivity over last little while, and it is nice to see some of the suggestions/bug reports with DA2 slowly getting addressed. Thank you.
RE UI scaling, I was surprised to see mention of allowing to make the fonts larger. I would love to see it smaller. Even more importantly, I would love to see the font smaller in printouts… pretty please :).
I have contacted support but did not get help in being able to print a report for my cpa that looks like the register, with transactions and balances starting on the 1st of the month and ending the last day of the month. Now I have to fool around with the quarter report and cross out the unwanted transactions. Not very pretty. I’ve only been using banktivity since last year.
It will be really nice to have a way to calculate IRR of any type of account – not just investment accounts. Many times managed portfolios will be tracked at the consolidated account level and not as an investment account with individual buy/sell/dividend transactions. Thanks.
I would add to this the need to correct the current imperfection around IRR as well. The software currently annualizes the return of a volatile investment out 365 days. So, if a stock loses 2% of its value in a few days, that will be extrapolated as if it continued at the same cadence for the rest of the year. It works for bonds/CDs/fixed rate investments, but it’s absolutely inappropriate for stocks, and all financial institutions know this and instead report an absolute return YTD instead of IRR for such investments.
thanks for the update Ian. I moved to Banktivity about the time you started your subscriptions, and I’ve been very happy with it. Like everyone I have a list of small improvements that would make my life easier. One is I think very similar to Bala’s: I look at my investments on a consolidated basis, and cash in those accounts is a conscious investment decision. So I’d like to see the IRR on my whole portfolio (3-5 separate accounts), including cash.
My requirements are reasonably uncomplicated and I find the program really useful, but would also appreciate the ability to automatically record stock prices on the ASX. Also, we have a 10% GST (VAT in UK) and it would be really useful if this could be automatically calculated for specific payees. Many thanks.
Love your programs and help from you people. Not sure if this is on your list but downloading bank transactions onto Banktivity is still difficult. There seem to be many payments that come in from my banks that are not matched and create a duplicate payment. And there are also many payments made by the bank that do not download at all. So I have to spend time trying to eliminate duplicate payments and clear payments that the bank paid that did not download. Maybe you can setup a separate file of bank payments received that don’t match and I can finish the matching work without worrying about duplicates. Just saying!!
Brilliant News!! Banktivity is now the no 1 all round financial software. Just one small suggestion which I have raised online. With dividend reinvest option when the divi is paid and reinvested there is usually a few pennies left over. The reinvest option relies on the exact amount that is paid in divi all being reinvested. Please tweak so that if say one is paid £15.00 in divi. The share price is £4 so £12.00 is reinvested the remaining £3 get added to the cash balance. At the moment I still have to enter two transactions. One for the divi and another for the buy order. This should be a relatively easy tweak !!! I can then reduce transactions!!! I think you are relying on fractional shares being used but this is the exception with many brokerages
Speaking of dividends, I have one ETF that issues a capital gain dividend once per year. No new shares are issued as the amount is re- invested directly into the fund, but it does increase my cost basis. There is no way that I know of to specify a dividend or capital gain with 0 shares that also increases the cost basis. The new average cost feature has been very helpful, and would like to get this last item to be accurate. Long time user since iBank 4, keep up the good work.
Thanks for sharing these updates and what is coming. It is exciting. I’ve been a user for many years and Banktivity has continued to get better and better each year! Thank you for making the investment!
I’m really glad to hear about the upcoming enhancement to peel off a new document. My file has become really larger with a lot of unnecessary data.
Like others, my largest complaint is the struggles with Direct Access. I spend way more time than I’d like on issued related to Direct Access. I will say your support team is excellent. Each time I email or chat with them, they are always responsive and “on top” of whatever the issue is. Justin has been a huge help to me these past several weeks!
I also look forward to the tool to “peel off” and create a new file. Very helpful.
Hello Ian, thanks for the update!
Beyond dedicating the extra resources for Direct Access (much needed, thank you), I would add just how important it is to enhance the investment reporting. Notably:
1) The ability to transfer securities between accounts (currently, cost basis data is lost everytime a stock/fund is moved to a new account, resetting performance data tracking)
2) Reporting on the total portfolio, including exposure by geography, sector/industry, company size (small, mid, large, mega cap), and valuation metrics (P/E, P/B ratios, beta, etc.)
For item 2, I would consider this a premium addition that would be worth paying extra for (even though its included with Quicken subscription today).
I really appreciate the extra direct access options that Quicken doesn’t have that are available in Banktivity, its just so important that you dedicate sufficient resources to make sure they’re working. Thank you!
I agree with William, especially around his point 2 re: investment reporting. Just sector/industry and % holdings would be so valuable. I’ve always felt the investment reporting could be enhanced through my gold subscription.
Hi Ian are there any plans to be able to scan receipts into Banktivity, I’ve requested a few times and have been told that it’s on the list, but I’d like to know how far down the list it is…in 2022 or is it way down the list?
Hi Andrew, it is pretty far down the list. It seems like we get less and less requests for this feature.
Wasn’t that already a thing in previous versions?
Your auto matching algorithm continues to be a pain! Either give us the option to not match at all, or to review and approve or disapprove transactions you are trying to match. I’m tired of untangling the knot month after month…..
Hi. You can go to Preferences > Import and uncheck “Clean up imported transactions”. Once you to that then the algorithms will not be used.
Feature request
Reports filter like iTunes Smart Playlist or a smart folder in finder
Account X, with this and this tag. between the period.
It would be great!
+1 I agree with Joao , I miss the flexibility that the old smart accounts gave you in V4. This would be a great big feature add to the product.
+1 for William’s point 2 on Portfolio reporting, in particular valuation metrics and portfolio %.
It would be nice to track precious metals like we can stock market securities. For example, tracking the number of ounces or grams of gold, silver, platinum, etc. I don’t think tracking the spot price automatically is necessary but just to build an inventory of ounces. I think we can enter the market value manually easily enough since there aren’t that many types of metals. And a simple report to compare it with the purchase price to show gains as well would be nice.
Great work on Banktivity, I’d like to see three ‘improvements’. They would be to add UK fund prices, add an option for single line view of transactions and an option to place ‘goals’ in my preferred order of priority.
Thanks.
+1 for single line view of transactions
Thanks for the “Document Pruning” feature. I store receipts and cancelled checks with transactions, making easy to find these if needed later. This is an outstanding feature of Banktivity! With that in mind, my file has bloated to 400+ MB with all of the stored PDF’s and “pruning” the file is desirable.
Honestly, I have very few complaints and no regrets moving from Quicken years ago. I would say the only challenge I face is when I get dividend or capital gain reinvestments in a brokerage account, I have to manually enter the share price from my statement. Mildly annoying, hardly worth complaining about, but I thought worth a mention.
Thanks for providing a great product; best out there (in my opinion). Keep up the great work.
Thanks for the update Ian, Direct Access for ANZ in New Zealand is still a major pain. I have a support request in to your support since the feature broke, but have never received an update. ANZ replies, “Banktivity not a major client”, so they will not look from their end. Other NZ banks are working.
How about some training videos on report usage?
A feature I’d like to see added would be to the budget screen when not using the envelope method. In addition to the Budgeted and Actual columns another column that shows the difference between them. Then you could see at glance amounts over/under for each category.
Looking forward to reports on the iPad.
good news, especially about the adjustable interface
however I would like to suggest three improvements
– possibility to be able to search transactions by the original description that comes from the bank statement (when it is replaced by a rule)
– when we are entering/changing transactions, the Payee field should work in the same way as the category field, i.e., when we are typing a payee, the results will appear as long as there is a similar word
– possibility to access the payees & rules window from the transactions window
Hi Ian,
Could you possibly advise when the ability to schedule a payment or (most importantly income for salaries) on the last day / last working day of a month?
I’ve been needing this for a very long time!
Thanks in advance!
IGG team, thank you for developing a fabulously feature-rich app. Respectful that users likely have different feature requests but here’s mine:
– Data feeds. With vendor support, add FIs requested by customers (I’ve asked for a few)
– Goals/Retirement. Add cashflows from government state pensions (e.g. UK, Canada)
– Calendar. Add info for securities (e.g. $amount on maturity date of a bond/GIC)
– FX rates. Show historical balances using historical fx rates (I believe currently applies today’s fx rate to historical balances)
Thank you for Document Pruning. A long awaited feature. I have been a customer from the iBank days and have decades of old data I would like pruned. I really look forward to this feature in the product.
I agree with Ross (May 9th, 2022), it would be great if Banktivity could include info on securities (e.g. maturity date, amount on maturity date, etc.)
I have been a Banktivity customer for many years. A valuable feature seems to have been dropped. Having several accounts across several institutions, The account list is long. It would be very helpful to be able to assign colors to the accounts. (Particularly the ledger). Currently, I may need to go to a savings account to transfer money to a checking account. With all the accounts the same color, it is easy to start entering additional transactions in the savings account rather than on the checking account. We don’t need 256,000 colors but a couple of dozen colors would likely work well. After spending time entering several transactions in the wrong account, then having to delete them and re-enter them in the correct account, this would be a major help.
Thanks for being a long time customer and giving us your feedback. I do want to let you know, if you ever enter transactions in the wrong account, you can drag and drop them into a different account instead of deleting and re-entering them. I hope this helps.
Hi, just wondering if you have an ETA on these updates?
No specific date, but we have started a private beta. Next will be public beta.
Good to hear. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to help test the public beta when it becomes available.
Thanks