I found this old article while bumming around the 'net called Challenging the Finance Software Giants. It's a decent article highlighting the basic strengths and weaknesses of the major personal financing software companies and their smaller competitors. It was written in April 2005.

I found it while bumming around hoping to discover some new development in this area of personal financial planning, but I haven't yet discovered what I've been hoping to find for oh these many years, which is an online personal financial planning application (that has an option for actual installable software for those people who aren't as migratory in their computer-use habits as I am) that interacts with bank institutions online, does neat graphs and charts of financial habits and trends, doesn't require a degree in either computer programming or accounting to understand, and is easy to update.

Since these are all impossible things to locate, it seems, I'm just going to gripe here instead, and hope that one day perhaps, someone who shares my vision of a usable personal financial planning application and the knowledge of languages electroniques will perhaps invent such a beast (or at least help me translate my ideas into something the computer will understand).

Alas, I am relegated to using the number-crunching powers of Microsoft's Excel or any of the other spreadsheet programs of which I am in possession. *Le sigh*