A Quicken alternative for UK banks

For UK households looking for a Quicken alternative, Money by Zaweba is a free, offline option that reads the files UK banks actually give you. It imports QIF and OFX statements, recognises the CSV layouts of the main UK banks, and works in pounds with dd/mm/yyyy dates whatever your PC is set to. It doesn't sync with banks; you download statements and import them.

What Quicken is

Quicken is one of the longest-running personal finance programs, first sold decades ago and used by a great many households to keep track of accounts, bills and budgets. It's paid software, and its QIF format became a common way for banks and other programs to exchange transactions. Over the years its focus has been mainly on the North American market.

That last point is why people search for an alternative. A program built around US banks, US dates and dollars can feel like hard work when your statements come from a building society in pounds.

Why Money suits UK statements

The CSV wizard is the heart of it. It finds the header row past any preamble a bank puts at the top of the file, and it recognises the layouts of Nationwide, Barclays, Monzo, Starling, Lloyds and Halifax, Santander and HSBC and First Direct. For other banks it guesses the columns from their names and the data. It copes with dates written as dd/mm/yyyy, as dd Mon yyyy, as yyyy-mm-dd and in the US style, and with either one signed amount column or separate money in and money out columns. Once it has seen a bank's layout, it remembers it inside your money file, so the next import skips the wizard.

The category tree is UK from the start, with Council Tax, TV Licence and Home Insurance under Household, plus a Business branch for sole traders. 92 starter payee rules put familiar UK shops and services into those categories automatically.

Bringing your Quicken history across

If you have files exported from Quicken, the QIF importer is the route. It handles bank, cash and card accounts, reads both UK and US date styles, and understands Quicken's own 7/25'26 style of date. Categories, split transactions and transfers between accounts written in the file are carried across, so a shopping trip that was split in Quicken arrives split in Money. Your own payee rules take priority over the category named in the QIF file, which keeps new imports consistent with how you've chosen to file things.

OFX and QFX are covered too, both the older 1.x files and the 2.x XML ones, for bank and credit card accounts. The bank's own transaction id is used to spot rows you already have, so overlapping downloads don't double up.

What to expect that's different

Money is deliberately simpler in some places. There's no bank connection at all, so nothing downloads by itself. Investments are valued by hand rather than with live prices, and accounts in other currencies show their own symbol without being converted. Reports print from an exported PDF rather than straight to a printer.

Against that, everything stays in one .ozm file on your PC, with an optional AES-256 password and the last 10 backups kept beside it. It's free software under the EULA, with no account, and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Making the move

Start with File, then Try the sample file to get a feel for the layout. Then make a new money file, add your accounts with opening balances, and import either your Quicken QIF exports or fresh statements from your bank. Check the review screen, correct a few categories, and let the payee rules learn from you. After a month or two of imports, the reports will tell the same story your old program did, in pounds and with UK dates.