Set your preferences

Selecting the File->Preferences menu item gives you the ability to set the appearance and behavior of Moneydance to suit your personal needs. Below is an overview of the settings available under each tab of the preferences window.

Some settings that affect transaction registers won't take affect until you change registers or restart Moneydance.

General

The items under the General tab allow you to configure basic settings such as the language, date format, decimal point, and other application settings.

Confirm Transaction Changes If you are editing a transaction and click on another transaction this option will display a confirmation message asking if you wish to save the current transaction or not. If this option is not selected you will switch to editing the newly selected transaction and any changes on the previous transaction are automatically saved.

Show full account paths Accounts and Categories (Income/Expense accounts) can have sub-accounts, like "Loan:Interest" or "Salary:Bonus" or "Bank of America:Checking". When you select one of these sub-accounts in the Category field of a transaction, it will appear as I showed above - Parent:Child with a colon in between. If you deselect this preference it will just show the name of the child account. You probably want this one checked unless you run a really low screen resolution or have really long account names.

Register Follows Recorded Transactions

Use VAT/GST Enables Income and Expense accounts (categories) be associated with tax information.

Case sensitive auto completion If you enter a transaction with a payee of "Electric Bill", and then you enter a new transaction and start typing "elect..." it will not auto-complete to the other one because the "e" is lower case instead of upper case. If you uncheck the option, it will match.

Auto-Insert Decimal Points If this option is selected, typing "200" in a field will auto-insert the decimal point making the actual field value "2.00", de-selecting this option will make the field value be "200.00".

Beep when Transactions Change This option causes Moneydance to make a noise when recording a transaction.

Auto-create New Transactions When selected, this option will keep the new transaction dialog open after recording a new transaction, so you can continue entering multiple new transactions quickly. If de-selected, the new transaction dialog will close once a transaction is saved.

Separate tax date for transactions Adds another field for "Tax Date" (visible in two-line mode or when editing transaction - located under the normal date field) that lets you record a secondary date on the transaction.

Show all accounts in popup Categories are really Income or Expense accounts and are not normally displayed in the account drop-down list in the upper left corner. If you select this option it will display all accounts, including the Income and Expense accounts (Categories) in this drop-down list.

Save On Every Quit Performs a save operation when exiting Moneydance normally. This prevents accidental data loss by forgetting to save the file before exiting.

Colors

The items under the Colors tab allow you to specify customized colors for certain parts of Moneydance. Click on the color panel of each item to select a different color for that item.

Network

Under this tab are options that change how Moneydance uses the network. Options include HTTP proxy settings and default browser.

Check Printing

This tab allows the selection of check types to be used when printing checks. It also provides the ability to completely customize the field positions on checks and the number of checks on each page.

Printing

This tab allows the customization of printing settings. This includes the font to be used when printing from Moneydance.

Backup

This tab provides the ability to customize the automatic backup feature of Moneydance. Backups can be configured to be saved in a location of your choice every so many days. Also you can configure Moneydance to autosave every X number of minutes.

Homepage

This tab provides the ability to customize the information that appears on your home page as well as its order. For more information about customizing your home page, please see [Customize the homepage].