Money Dashboard Reviews 

Had the app since September 2019 (this review June 2020). Being able to see all my bank accounts and credit card balances and transaction in one place, automatically updated was a huge step forward. The ability to search for transactions was much more powerful than those available on my Lloyds personal banking app and of course it searched all my accounts, not just my regular high st bank. There were some issues with tagging transactions which could have been better, but I think they were working on those. The help facility was pretty good... a response from a human being who had read, understood, and responded promptly and intelligently to complex questions..imagine that from a high street bank! All this looked like an answer to prayer when it came to sorting out accounts for my tax return etc.
However the new need to re-register every 90 days for each account (often a fractured and frustrating process) and the fact that the app no longer supports my credit card providers (John Lewis and M&S) seriously damage its utility. There is the basis of a tool for every-one wanting to simplify their finances here, but for the moment the utility is, most regrettably, marginal.

Disappointing that after years of carefully training the original app to categorise my expenditure to produce useful trends and data, MD now introduce a brand new app which require a new account and carries forward none of your old data. And the new app has around 20% of the functionality of the original. Hugely badly handled, lack of respect for loyal users.

I found the new app to be fast and intuitive, hooking up with my bank accounts through open-banking seamlessly & giving a fantastic oversight of my current financial position, with many new features & views to absorb.

In my experience there are always associated glitches, bugs and gremlins with the introduction of ambitious significantly complex applications like this. Having read some of the reviews I can see the need for some improvements in areas such as tagging and categorisation, and they are happening.

Steve Tygar has assured me that the Money Dashboard Team are working tirelessly to ensure that this continues to be the best financial management app available. His track record and that of Money Dashboard speaks for itself, providing an easy to use product, free of charge, accessible from multiple devices, to 100's of thousands of mainly very satisfied users.

Since open banking Santander credit card shows 'switch to open banking' continuously. On mobile, if you switch, it goes around the houses for a while giving indications of success, but ultimately returns to 'connect to open banking' all over again. Been that way for a couple of months.

So I tried again today and got the same results on mobile, but worse on desktop...It got to the 'switching back to your bank' and timed out first and second time, then on the third I was locked out of my bank as this time it rejected the account code

Have selected Poor as an overall view - there are some excellent things about it and some bad/very poor things about it:

Pros:
1) love that it works across multiple devices
2) its free
3) relatively easy to use
4) i have had no problems linking my accounts

Cons:
1) cannot manually add transactions for "offline" accounts such as cash or pre-loaded store cards - there is a work-around by splitting transactions such as cash withdrawals or a card payment to a store card, but this is a long way around and hard work. It also makes it much more susceptible to human error and therefore reduces the trust I can have in the reports and figures on my spending - which is the whole point of the app. Really needs this manual entry function to have a decent chance at being a good money management tool - this is an absolute must.

2) It automatically "Tags" most transactions, while some are left as "untagged" and these flag up red as untagged. You cannot turn off auto-tag and it often gets the tags it does assign wrong in my experience. So this means I have to double check every transaction. It would be far better to have an option where it classes ALL new transactions as "untagged" because then I would have peace of mind that once I have tagged them all myself (tagging is very quick and easy) that they are all done correctly and my reports will be accurate.

3) There is no option to choose what data to import when you link a new bank account. In my case this meant I had thousands of entries going back to 2017 (all incorrectly auto-tagged) that I had to delete as I wanted to start my use of Money Dashboard from the first of the current month with a clean sheet. It would be much better if imported data could be reviewed within the app first where it could be filtered before finally being displayed in the app.

4) Accounts only stay linked for 3 months - I appreciate this is because of the financial regulations and not Money Dashboard's fault - however I fear I am going to have to re-import all my data again in 3 months time and go through the pain of point 3) above all over again every 3 months. The solution to 3) would prevent this being a problem.

5) You can create your own tags which is great BUT you cannot delete them, nor can you edit or delete the default ones that "come with" the app. Therefore all my custom tags are mixed in with a whole load of others that are irrelevant to me which increases the time needed to find the right tag and also increases the likelihood of making a mistake. The solution would be to be able to archive or disable unwanted tags.

6) Does not seem to automatically update so you have to manually click "reload" to get an up-to-date balance.

Two stars for the concept being good.

The app will not respond or update balances since March 11, which makes the app completely pointless.

My decision is to delete the app and not use.

I have used this app for six months and was really loving it, putting a lot of time into tagging transactions and making budgets initially - until the problems started. First, with no changes from me, a few duplicate transactions started to creep in when I refreshed bank accounts. I had to man

Today, I looked on the planner for one account and was surprised to see a huge outgoing transaction of £999 yesterday (when there had been no significant transactions in any of my accounts, given I'm self isolating).

Curious, I cross-checked balances on the planner with my bank account over the last six months and found they are routinely stated to be anywhere between £700 and £1000 above the actual balance, for no apparent reason.

The fictional £999 transaction brings the displayed balance in line with my bank, but now I can't trust anything the website says, or regard it as a true balance history.

I've no idea whether it has always done this, or whether it has retrospectively changed all the balances due to some new programming error.

I am considering deleting the account and re-adding it, but the thought of spending all that time re-adding tags to six months' worth of transactions just makes my stomach sink. I will give MD a couple of days to correct the problem (maybe it will just go away).

If it isn't fixed by then I'll just unlink it, delete the app, and go back to using spreadsheets 😔 Totally unreliable, do not recommend.

Since the latest, botched, upgrade to their app/website this product has plummeted from useful to useless.

It refuses to connect to most of my accounts which makes it rather pointless. The claim that it is both a budget tracker & money manager doesn't hold water if it cannot be used to track credit card expenses nor regular utility bills.

Since the change over to open banking I currently have only one bank supported. The others I cant use since 14th March. I cannot add transanctions manually. This makes the whole app redundnat except for one account. So this has rendered it useless as an all round money managing app

Duplicate Transactions. When it is working in an accurate and timely fashion it's a very useful tool. I recently switched, as requested by Money Dashboard, to Open Banking, and have since had duplicate transactions. This has rendered MD useless. I logged a call with their support desk two weeks ago, and have since chased the support call but haven't had any updates and the issue is still there. Very poor support by any standard.
#234591

Signed up, went to connect my bank (Natwest), just keep getting
'The page you are trying to access is no longer available.'.

When wanting to use a service that's connected to my bank, trust is everything, and so getting errors when initially setting up is very concerning; won't be using any further.

Useless can’t even log in
No way of contacting them
Update
After receiving a reply from money Dashboard, I have contacted there support and tried to create an account
Still no help from money Dashboard

I have now been able to log in and start using my account

Finally an app where you can see all your account at the same place. I have tried Yolt in the past but trust me, Money Dashboard is much better.

I love the layout and adjustable widgets on the browser home screen. The fact that it is browser based and app based is really excellent. However, I really want to be able to see how much I am spending per category over any time period. This cannot be done in Spend by Category List which only allows a max 7 days! And it cannot be exported to Excel.
But the worst of it is that the existing Categories cannot be renamed and it is a HUGE job to setup new categories and re-assign the transactions to these instead.
Real shame as so much potential.

Having said that, if categories are not your thing, this is a brilliant product

Update - Great and refreshingly honest response from Money Dashboard - I shall look in to the CSV export. Thank you

I have been using Money Dashboard for one year now. At the moment it is the best service to track your personal finances across several accounts. It has a function to let you add offline accounts that I use to add those accounts that cannot be updated automatically. It does require a bit of fiddling for the tags of the transactions but you quickly get used to it. It works well to give you an idea of what your total balance is at any moment. However other functions do not seem to work properly for me (e.g. the spend report). Moreover, transfers towards offline accounts should not count as expenses. But I give it 5*, for offering a good free service.

I don't like this app at all as it doesn't update often enough and I can't seem to refresh it manually. I am just as well logging into each of my bank apps individually as Money Dashboard doesn't give an accurate real-time snapshot of all accounts.

3 weeks in and this is, well, interesting. Fabulous potential but some oddities.
Graphs on the planner make no sense to me. Some of the dashboard features are similarly dubious. No double entry on transfers requires some thought on tags. Tagging itself is OK, but tag taxonomy is inflexible.
The biggest issue is that syncing with banks isn't reliable and consistent and nearly always incomplete. This may not be the fault of the platform and it may be your bank. My balance is almost always accurate, but transactions are delayed. In other words, the transactions rarely add up to the balance like they do on your host banking platforms. This presents a potentially misleading picture and the app doesn't do anything to alert users about this.
I use the transactions table and the budget review charts rather than the forecasts and budgets.

I've just starting using this. I tried a few months ago but it wouldn't connect to my bank. Still trying to work out how to plan future costs that are annual or quarterly. Very reliable.

Really great idea but over the last few months Starling data has been at best flakey with some payments taking weeks to come through, and any payments with a delayed payment (pay at pump) just fail to update to full amount.

The solution would be to allow temporary transactions for the missing records but they don't

Serious flaw in the above is there is nothing in the app that flags that the balance and transactions don't reconcile, to alert you the records are out of sync

Thought it might of been down to my account being old - so deleted it and started all over again and straight away transactions in starling bank prior to creation were missing so it wasn't that.

Update for response by MD team

Hi

Thanks for the response but I did contact support on three occasions to be given the stock answer like you have put here that your working on it (even though the status page shows no issues with Starling)

The tool is totally untrustworthy and not fit for use if Im having to keep a mental note of 5 adjustments and 10 missing items when I look at it.

As I said it such a shame as I really like the offering just can't trust it.

Second update - Tried once more and again total imbalance of transactions to bank balance, contacted support with yet again 'we are looking into it' is pretty much the stock response. Again no flag on starling status that there are any issues - is it just me?

Absolute rubbish. I tried to enter my Bank details about 5 times over a week. Each time it said it was contacting the bank but after an hour I gave up. I notice a number of people have had the same problem