MoneyWell uses the very effective envelope budgeting method (well, in this case, it’s a “bucket” budgeting method) to help you better manage your finances and plan for future expenses. Among other features, MoneyWell offers Direct Connect Banking and uses a single-window interface designed to simplify your experience with the MoneyWell software.

So how does MoneyWell stack up to the other Mac-based competitors such as iBank, Snowmint’s Budget, and others?  Hopefully this MoneyWell review and walkthrough will give you a better idea of what MoneyWell has to offer in terms of effective personal finance software.

*Note: This review is for version 1.4.12 of the MoneyWell software.

Who’s Behind MoneyWell?

MoneyWell is produced by No Thirst Software LLC, a small company built by entrepreneur Kevin Hoctor.  Kevin states that part of the mission of the company is to “deliver excellent products and services that change peoples lives.”  Not a bad mission statement if you ask me.  And if there’s any avenue in which peoples lives can be changed, it’s certainly in helping them better manage their money and debt.

I personally like that MoneyWell is produced by such a small company.  This usually means that customer service is personable and often quick.  Customer satisfaction is usually top priority in small companies such as No Thirst Software.  Also, the creator has a vested interest in the product, and as such, will be very focused on future improvements.

Installing MoneyWell

MoneyWell offers a free trial version of the software for you to test drive before you buy.  The only limitation of the trial is that you can only enter 200 transactions.  This should definitely be enough for you to see if you want to buy the software for good.

After clicking the Free Trial button on the MoneyWell website, you’re guided through the basic download and installation steps to easily install MoneyWell on your computer.

After installing MoneyWell you’re given a couple of options to get started:

I particularly like that they offer the option to import an OFX, QFX, or QIF file from another budgeting software application if you’ve been using one.  Also, the sample file is a good way to click around and learn the system a little bit before diving in with your own transactions.

Being that this review will try to give you a walkthrough-type view, I chose to start from scratch.

*Note:  The MoneWell website has a good collection of tutorial videos to help you with learning the ins and outs of MoneyWell and getting started with your own budget.  Be sure to check it out if you’re needing help.

Setting Up MoneyWell

When starting from scratch, you’re prestented with this screen:

Here you can see the overall look of the application (although it doesn’t yet have any data in it).  We’ll go over the single-screen design in more detail a little later.

Adding Buckets

While this is probably pretty self explanatory, here you will check each “bucket” that you want in your budget.  These buckets are the same as envelopes in other envelope-based budgeting software programs (you may want to consider these your “categories” of income and spending).

Throughout your budgeting, you will add money to (through income) and take money out of (through spending) these buckets.  You can change these later, but you should do your best to cover all of your expense categories here.

*While I didn’t see an option to create custom buckets in this step, I did see later on that you can add custom buckets by right clicking on a bucket (in the left sidebar of the appliation) and clicking New Bucket.  You can also click the “plus” icon beneath the bucket list.  I was glad to see this capability since any effective budget must allow you to customize it to your specific spending needs.

Adding Your Bank Accounts

After adding your buckets, you’re taken to a screen to add your bank accounts.  MoneyWell offers Direct Connect to your bank which allows you to automatically download your bank accounts as well as your transactions.  You can also choose to add your bank account manually if you choose to do so (or if you have difficulty connecting with your bank).

It wouldn’t let me connect with my bank (Chase).  After digging around a bit, I found that Chase charges $10/month to allow direct connect with personal finance software.  Looks like I’ll be adding my accounts and transactions mannually (which is fine with me — I actually think it helps reinforce the monitoring of your spending habits).

MoneyWell’s Single-Window Interface

MoneyWell does a pretty good job of introducing you to the single-window interface that it uses.  Here’s the screenshot that they provide on their website:

I see this as a total matter of personal preference.  Some will really like the single-window plan, while others may see it as a bit crowded for so much information.  I don’t think it’s crowded per se, but I could see the benefit of having a separate windows for transactions (allowing more space for more historical budget/spending information without having to click to each separate bucket).

Draw the Fill Line: Setting Up a Spending Plan

Once you’ve added your bank accounts to MoneyWell, you’re now ready to set up your Spending Plan (also known as a budget).  MoneyWell refers to this step as creating “fill to here” lines on your buckets.  Basically you are noting how much money you will need to spend during the month from each bucket.

You can create your Spending Plan by clicking on the Spending Plan button  at the top of the MoneyWell screen.  You’re presented with this screen:

If you’re just starting out with MoneyWell, you will enter in the “Planned” amount for each bucket.  You can set the Frequency and Timing for each bucket as well.  If you have a number of past transactions already in MoneyWell (if, for example, you imported a larger file from another personal finance software application), you can choose to calculate your spending plan by your past history.

Data entry into this Spending Plan was quite easy.  At first I was frustrated that I couldn’t tab through the fields to enter the numbers quickly.  But I soon found that by hitting Enter on the keyboard after each entry, it takes you down to the next bucket’s Planned field.  You can thank me later for saving you loads of time with that little tip.

Fill the Buckets: Allocating Income

Once you’ve set up your spending plan (told each bucket how much money you need in it) , you can now allocate the money that you have in your bank accounts to your buckets.  If you’d like to start by allocating the beginning balance of your bank accounts, you’ll first need to designate the Starting Balance “transaction” to be used for your Salary bucket.  One way to do this is to click on the transaction and then choosing Salary from the Bucket drop down list in the Transaction Detail section.  You’ll then see that your Salary bucket shows that amount next to it.

Now, you can mannually allocate money from your salary bucket into your expense buckets by clicking and holding on the Salary bucket and then dragging your mouse over an expense bucket and releasing.  In the box that appears, type in what you’d like to allocate, and click Add.

By clicking on the Allocate Income icon ( ), you are given this screen:

The numbers in the far right column show the amount to be allocated to the respective buckets.  These are determined by your spending plan settings (you’ll notice that the numbers are half of what the “planned” column shows.  This is because I have my income set to come twice a month (hence the buckets will be filled with half the planned amount, twice during the month).

You can change the allocated amount by double clicking in the cell and changing the number. You can also prioritize the expense from Lowest to Highest.  This will help with allocating your income and making sure that your most important expenses are always paid.
After allocating your income you will see the balances of each bucket in the left sidebar.  See the following screenshots:

Empty the Buckets: Adding Transactions

There are a number of different ways to add transactions in MoneyWell.  As already mentioned, you can use Direct Connect to automatically download transaction data.  If, for whatever reason, you don’t use Direct Connect, you can either upload an exported file from your bank or you can add each transaction mannually.  We’ll look at both.

Enter Transactions Mannually

Entering transactions mannually is fairly easy.  You can new transactions by clicking the Transaction icon ( ).  You can then tab through most of the important details in the Transaction Detail section (on the right side of the screen) and enter as you go.  I like that for most transactions you won’t need to use your mouse much while entering the data (unless you want to use the Status feature).

At first I was disapointed that you needed to use your mouse to click the transaction icon for each new transaction.  But then I happened to try hitting Command + N on the keyboard and it did just what I had hoped: it started a new transaction.  Trust me, this will save you loads of time if you’re entering all your transactions mannually.

Importing Transactions

If you’re looking for a quicker alternative for entering your transactions, you download your transactions from your bank and import them into MoneyWell.  The file needs to be either an OFX, QIF, or CSV file, so make sure your banks can export one of those file formats (most banks will).

After downloading the file from your bank’s website, simply click the Import icon ( ) and select the file.  After choosing a date format that will work with your file, click “Import” and your transactions should show up in your transaction history.

The one thing that you will need to do here is go through your imported transactions and specify which bucket each transaction is for.

Moving Money in MoneyWell

Moving Money Between Buckets

You’ll sometimes find that you’ve overspend in a certain category.  Since you’re using the envelope budgeting methodology, you’ll have to take money from another category to be used to cover the overspent amount.  Doing so in MoneyWell is fairly easy.   Just as you do when you alocate money from your Salary bucket to your expense buckets, you can just “drag and drop” money from one bucket and put it into the other.

For example, in the screenshots below I had overspent in my Gifts category by $56.63 (I had $30 in the bucket to spend, but I became too generous and spent $86.63).  To cover the overage, I decide that I can take money from my Vacation/Travel bucket.  By clicking the Vacation bucket and dragging it to the Gifts bucket, I can choose to add the $56.63 to make it even.  See the screenshots for a play by play of how that happens:

Moving Money Between Bank Accounts

When you transfer money between your bank accounts (for example, from your Checking to Savings), you’ll want to record that as a transaction.  Moving money between bank accounts, however, is just as easy as moving it between your buckets.

Using the same drag and drop technique that’s outlined above, simply drag money from your checking account onto your savings account.  Then simply fill out the amount you want transferred and click Add.  If you want the amount to be shown in a bucket (in this case, Savings), you may designate a bucket for that transaction.

Reconcile Bank Accounts

Another little feature that some may find handy is the help MoneyWell gives when reconciling your bank transactions.  It’s fairly self explanatory and easy to use, so I won’t say much here.  But here’s a screenshot in case you’re interested:

I’m not sure that we need a whole new reconciliation screen for this, but the visual aids will be helpful for some.  The only thing I would add in terms of account reconciliation is the ability to do it directly from the regular transactions screen by clicking the circle to the left of the transaction to mark it as cleared.

Reports

The Reports section in MoneyWell may not be what most people might expect.  What some other personal finance software programs call reports are actually graphical representations of their spending information.

Being that MoneyWell shows much of this graphical representation in the main screen (determined by what you have selected at any give time), MoneyWell doesn’t have a separate graphical analysis area.  MoneyWell’s Reports are basically a number of different data tables showing your spending information.  While these may useful to some, I personally prefer a larger set of graphs to choose from.

Granted I may not have enough data (or rather, data over time), to really appreciate the graphs that MoneyWell provides, I’ve found other applications to have better spending analysis capabilities via their various reports and graphs.

Other Notable Features

MoneyWell offers a number of other features that aren’t covered in detail in this review.  You can read more about them on their website, but I thought I’d mention a few here.

• Scheduled Transactions
• Search Bar
• “Memorized” Transactions
• Smart Buckets
• Copy to Excel or Numbers

MoneyWell Price

MoneyWell costs $49.99.  They offer a free trial (you can enter up to 200 transactions) so you can get a good feel for what it has to offer before buying it.  If you find that MoneyWell helps you manage your money better, $49.99 is a small price to pay.

Money Back Guarantee

If you purchase MoneyWell and then later decide that it’s not for your, you can get a full refund up to 60 days after purchase.  No questions asked.  This is a solid guarantee that I believe the company will stand behind.

Conclusion

MoneyWell uses the solid envelope budgeting methodology that has helped people get a handle on their finances for years.  The MoneyWell system utilizes this methodology well.  I would like to see a little more encouragement for the users to “budget to zero.”  Currently it’s a little too easy for users to leave a chunk of money unbudgeted in their Salary bucket.  So if you use MoneyWell, make sure to stay disciplined and get to as close to a zero-based budget as possible.

The MoneyWell software was clean and professionaly developed.  I found no bugs and only a couple of areas that I thought could have used some usability improvements.  Data entry was quite simple and fairly quick.  As far as the software goes, it felt very solid.  In terms of effectiveness, MoneyWell will get the job done with it’s budget “buckets.”  I was left wanting a little more in terms of reports and graphs, but those things aren’t the main features that most will look for in personal finance software.

All things considered, if you try MoneyWell and find that it works for you, go for it.  While I may still have other favorites above MoneyWell, it’s a solid budgeting tool that, if used correctly, will help you shed debt and increase your savings.

Being that I’m a huge proponent of budgeting using the time-tested envelope method, I’ve been looking forward to checking out Snowmint’s Budget for a little while now.

In general, most personal finance software applications that use envelope budgeting will help you manage your spending better.  But the methodology is just part of it.  The software also needs to be well designed, easy to use, and effective.  How does Budget by Snowmint stack up to the competition?  Let’s find out.

Note: This is a review of one of the 6.2 versions of Budget (Mac). There have since been newer versions released (up to 6.5), which are sure to have some improvements and changes.

Who’s Behind Budget?

The company that created Budget is Snowmint Creative Solutions, LLC.  It looks to be a small operation, with two principles at the head (Ron Hooper and Kyle Hammond) and a few other contractors.  I personally see this as a positive thing.  A small team means centralized responsibility and usually means that they take more ownership in the product.  This is a good thing.

There are a few things that stick out to me about the Snowmint company.  For one, everything that I read (online and on Snowmint’s website) points to the fact that Snowmint provides very good customer service and product support.  If contacted, they strive to respond to your questions within 24 hours.  The FAQ section is large and comprehensive.  Also, their forums provide a great deal of answers and appear to be rather active (with new posts and comments being added regularly).

They also have a great guarantee, but more on that later.

Getting Started with Snowmint Budget

Before I get into the actual set up process with Budget, I’d like to point out that Snowmint provides a good deal of help to get you started with Budget.  On their Budget Information page, they offer numerous helps including instructional pdf files, a visual (and effective) tour of the envelope budgeting concept, a set up tour, and a usage tour.  All of these were very helpful.

Another one of my favorites was this:

They even have instructions and guidance on how to use Budget to teach your child or teenager to learn to better manage their finances.  This is something that all of our youth need to learn and I was glad to see that it’s something that Snowmint has thought through.

Setting Up Budget

For this review and walkthrough I’ll be using the Mac version of the software.  When you first download Budget (by clicking the Free to Try button at top right of the website), you’re first presented with a Setup Assistant.  On the Budget Information page Budget provides a pdf file to walk you through setting the program up (that doesn’t use the Setup Assistant) as well as a Setup Tour (that does use the Setup Assistant).  I chose to use the Setup Assistant.

Import

After the introduction, you’re given the option to import a QIF or OFX data file.  Unclear as to what this was talking about (it didn’t already want me to import my transactions did it?), I searched in the help.  It turns out that this step allows you to import data from a previous budgeting software program (for example, Snowmint’s Budget Workbook).  For most, you’ll just want to skip this first step.

Setup Bank Accounts

This step is as simple as it sounds.  Simply give your bank account a name, enter an account balance, and click Create.

Create Envelopes

This is, arguably, the most important step of creating your budget.  Here you’ll create all of the envelopes that you’ll spend money “out of.”  If you’ve used budgeting software that didn’t use envelopes previously, you can consider these envelopes to be your different spending categories.

For example, you would have an envelope for your mortgage, one for groceries, one for entertainment, etc.

Snowmint’s Budget has a long drop down list for you to choose the envelopes from.  Or (and this is important) they allow you to create your own envelopes by simply typing it in the box.  Too many finance apps don’t allow you to create your own custom categories — I’m glad that Snowmint has seen the light.  Also, as you type, Snowmint offers suggestions.  I found this to be faster than using the drop down list.

The more fully you complete this step, trying to think of all your envelopes, the more effective your budget will be.  You may want to have a record of your past spending on hand for this step.

Distribute Funds

In this section you distribute your initial bank account amounts into the envelopes.  This is easily performed by double-clicking on the envelope listing and entering the amount.  I found out after clicking around that you can also use only the keyboard to enter amounts by arrowing down or up to the envelope and hitting the Tab key to edit (this will save you a ton of time).  Naturally, the Amount to Distribute amount is lowered by each distribution that you make.

Budget Setup

Budget tells you here that if you only wish to use the program as an account manager, than you’re now complete with the setup.  If, however, you want to use Budget as a budgeting tool (I hope that all of you would say, Yes!), it has a few more steps for you.

Using this software only as an account manager and not taking advantage of the envelope budgeting system would be like buying a Porsche and never taking it over 35 mph.

Enter Income / Expenses

The Enter Income step is fairly self explanatory, you enter the amounts and frequency of each source of your income.  Budget offers a number of pay frequencies — nice.

When you enter your expenses, it has you enter your budgeted amount for each expense.  These amounts can be anything from weekly to yearly budgets.  You also define which paycheck (in my case, Husbands or Wife’s paycheck) will be used for which envelope.

Setup Complete

There’s a friendly end screen once you’re done with the Setup Assistant.  It reminds you that your complete satisfaction is important to them and gives you their contact email.  It mentions that they try to respond to your email within 24 hours. A nice, reassuring touch.

Snowmint Budget Main Window

After the inital setup you’re then presented with the main window of Snowmint’s Budget:

The main window of Budget basically consists of four areas: the top toolbar, the left sidebar, the main envelope area, and the bottom “expansion” bar.  We’ll briefly go over each:

The Top Toolbar

Contains buttons that perform actions such as entering transactions, deposits, etc.  You’ll use this toolbar to see a transation history on a bank account basis or an envelope basis.  Also found are buttons for stats and an Info button that is used to view or change information for your envelopes or bank accounts.

The toolbar has a fairly intuitive interface.  Depending on what item you have selected, it dims or brightens icons that would be clickable for that item.  For example, if I’ve clicked on a bank account, it allows me to click on the Debit icon (brightened), but not on the Envelope History icon (dimmed).

Left Sidebar

The left sidebar contains your bank accounts and their balances.  By clicking on the individual bank acounts, you are shown the envelope balances that pertain to that bank account.

Also, with a bank acount seleced, you can click the Info button  to edit information on that account such as its name, preferences, next check #, a signature, etc.

By double clicking on an account, you open the Balance window to reconcile your bank accounts.

Envelope Area

All of your envelopes are found in the largest section of the screen.  I like that this clearly puts the emphasis on the balances in your envelopes, rather that simply what you have in your bank account (a reminder that each dollar spent must be accounted for with funds from an pre-planned envelope balance).

Each envelope shows the envelope name as well as the balance of funds in that envelope.  These envelopes are also a little more customizable (more on that later).

By clicking an envelope once, you can see the icons in the top toolbar brighten, allowing you to click on them.  This means that you can enter spending transactions (a check, debit, or credit card charge), record a deposit into that envelope, see the envelope transaction history and stats, and more.

Bottom Bar

The bar at the bottom the screen, while it doesn’t take up much space, can actually do quite a bit.

The leftmost icon opens the Envelope Display View.  This allows you to view envelopes in a customized way.  For example, I could create a Fixed Expense view to see all the envelopes that I consider fixed expenses.

To set up a custom envelope display view, simply right click in the Envelope Display window and then click New Envelope View.  Then click the Settings icon and choose your view preferences.

The Settings icon opens up a settings screen in which you customize the Envelope Display Views that you set up.  Among many other settings, this is where you determine which envelopes will show up in which view.

The Transactions icon opens a sidebar on the right side of the screen that contains transaction information.

The History icon opens a bottom window that shows transaction history for whichever account or envelope you choose.

The Stats icon adds some stats to the history view.

See the following screenshots to see each of these functions:

Customizing Envelopes

If you think the plain gray envelopes are a little bland, you’re right.  But the good news is you can customize them to a certain degree.

By clicking on an envelope and then clicking the Info icon in the top toolbar, the info window for that envelope opens up.  This window provides some good information such as the amount budgeted for the envelope, which pay that budgeted amount is coming from, and more.

If you click on the Appearance button, you can change the color of the envelope, as well as add a black and white or color icon to it.  With a couple of clicks, I turned my boring gray envelope into this:

After a few minutes, I was able to turn my envelopes into a little more colorful collection:

*If you wanted, you could color code your envelopes to help you visualize your spending.  For example, all fixed expenses could be lighter hughes of yellows, all your variable regular expenses in hughes of blue, and all your discretionary expenses (that you can control more), in darker hughes of reds.  Just a thought for those who see things more visually.

Here’s some screenshots of the envelope customization process:

Depositing (Adding Funds) into Budget

There are a few of different ways to go about recording your income or paycheck into Snowmint’s Budget.

Into an Envelope

If for example, you get some money that you want to only go into a certain envelope you can click that envelope and then click the Deposit icon .  Fill in the deposit information and click Record and you’ll see your bank account balance and the envelope balance increase by the amount of the transaction.

Manually

In most instances, however, you will be getting a larger paycheck and need to distribute that income into various different envelopes.  If this is the case, you click on the bank account (in the left sidebar) that it is to be deposited into and then click the Deposit icon.  In the Deposit window you input where the income is coming from, how much it is, and then distribute the income into the various envelopes as shown:

Using Pre-allocated Settings

If, however, you set up a budget (income and expenses) in the Setup Assistant when you began, you have another, much quicker option to record your income and distribute it to the envelopes.

Simply click on the Record Pay icon , select which pay source it is, and click either Record Pay now (to use the set allocations) or Adjust Pay Allocations (to make changes.  Your income is automatically put into the different envelopes for you according to the allocation that you set.

Adding Transactions

There are three basic ways to record transactions.  If the transaction covers only one envelope, the best way to do it is to click on an envelope and then one of the transaction icon (check, debit, or charge) and enter the transaction information (you can also just double click the envelope to open the transaction window).

If the transaction is going to be split across multiple enveloes, you click on a bank account and then click one of the transaction icons.  If you go this route, you’ll also need to set the amounts for each envelope.

You can also choose to use the Transaction Entry window to enter transactions.  As noted before, if you click the Transactions icon at the bottom of the screen, the Transactions Entry window opens.

What I Don’t Like About the Data Entry

It may be a personal preference, but I found that entering transactions into the system was a little too tedious.  The way it’s set up, while simple, requires you to make many clicks of the mouse.  I was longing for a list of sorts for the transactions so that I could just use my keyboard to enter multiple transactions very quickly.  Instead, I was clicking around to different envelopes for each transaction.  On weeks with a lot of transactions, this may get a little annoying.

Import Transactions

Thankfully, you can import your transactions from your bank.  This should save you loads of time.  I couldn’t get it to work with my .QIF file, but that may have been a problem with my institutions downloaded file and not with Snowmint Budget.

Transferring Funds

There will be times when you will need to take money from one envelope to pay for something from another envelope.  This is good in that it reinforces the idea that everything you spend, must be accounted for.

Transferring funds from one account to another is quite simple in >Budget.  All you have to do is click an envelope (that you want to take money out of) and drag your mouse to whichever envelope you want to transfer money into.  In this screenshot I was transferring money from my Restaurant envelope into the Groceries envelope:

I also noticed that when I tried to enter a transaction that would take my envelope balance negative, I got the following:

A nice touch.

A Few Other Neat Features

Stats

One of the icons in the top toolbar is the Stats icon:  It allows you to view various financial data in table, line graph, or bar graph formats. While this is a nice feature, a broader offering of reports would be nice.

Balance

Another Budget feature that may come in handy (especially if you still use monthly bank statements) is the Balance:

This is primarily used to reconcile your bank statements (or online transaction history) with your Budget software.  It’s fairly intuitive and easy to use.

…and More

This is not a complete list of all the features that Budget has to offer.  The documentation for the software goes over a number of others for the more advanced user.

Snowmint Budget Price

The listed price for Budget is $39.95 for a downloaded copy.  At the time of this writing, it was “on sale” at $29.95.  In terms of quality personal finance software this is a very reasonable price — even a little lower than most competitors.  If you want a physical CD, the price is $47.95.

Snowmint’s Free Trial

I’d also like to highlight that Snowmint offers a free trial for Budget.  It’s a great way to try the software out before you buy.  They have a fantastic money back guarantee, but if you want to take it for a test drive before handing over any dough, you can.  The trial allows 250 transactions and 4 balances, so depending on your rate of transactions, it could last up to 4 months.

To download Budget for free and start using the free trial, go to their catalog page, and then click the “TRY” button.

Snowmint’s Guarantee

Another good thing about Snowmint Budget is it’s great guarantee.  In their words: “If you are not 100% satisfied with any of our products for any reason within 60 days of your purchase we will give you a full refund.“  I would think 60 days of consistent use would be plenty of time for you to see if you like the product or not.

They also guarantee great support and privacy.  Be sure to check out their guarantee page to get an idea of how much they stand behind their product.

Conclusion

Budget by Snowmint is a solid personal finance software program that the Mac lovers out there may find to be a useful tool when trying to get a better handle on their spending. It’s also now available for Windows, so the PC users can also benefit.  I don’t believe that I ran across a single bug in the time that I spent in the application, something that hasn’t happened with the other Mac software applications that I’ve reviewed.

I really like that Budget uses the time-tested envelope budgeting methodology.  For those that are dedicated to using this software, it will definitely have a dramatic effect on your money management skills.  It’s hard to not manage your money better when you’re using the envelope method.

Is Snowmint’s Budget the best budget software out there? No.  Is it a strong contender (especially in the Mac environment)? Yes.  I had few complaints about Budget.  Primary among them was that the transaction entry could be designed to be a bit faster.  The reports could also use some work.  But all things considered, if you’re a Mac user and are looking for another alternative to help you manage your money, Budget by Snowmint is one that you should at least take for spin using the free trial.

Try Snowmint

So how does MySpendingPlan^TM stand up to the other online personal finance packages that offer their services (some for free as well)?  This review will walk you through the online budgeting system to help you get a better feel for what MySpendingPlan^TM has to offer.

My Experience with MySpendingPlan

The MySpendingPlan.com website is very clean and professional. Something I certianly hope will carry over into the software. The home page gives you some great insights in to how MySpendingPlan^TM can help you accomplish your goals to plan better, save more, and live smarter.

If you’d like, you may want to take a tour of the program by clicking Take a Tour at the top of the screen. While the ‘tour’ doesn’t really show you much of the actual software, it does help you to get a feel for MySpendingPlan^TM by highlighting a number of of it’s features.

Setting up MySpendingPlan

Signing up for a free account if fairly painless. A quick click on the Free Sign Up link and you’re on your way. After entering in a few pieces of personal information (not yet sure why they require a zip code, but they do), you’re told that a welcome email will be sent to your shortly.

The email, by the way, ended up in my junk box so you may want to check there and add it to your safe list. Aside from a Sign in link, the email didn’t provide much besides a few special offers that they want you to check out.

You can start immediately however, by clicking on the Go to My Account link at the bottom. Before going to your account, however, you’re given this screen:

I’m not even into the actual program yet and I’m already seeing advertisements (this particular one wants me to connect me to a realtor to sell my house). While I expected some ads and/or recommendations (they do, after all, have to make some money somehow to provide the service), the fact that it was so soon and so intrusive surprised me a bit.

Hopefully this is something that won’t be too intrusive in the future. They have a large green button titled Get Started, but don’t get confused. That is the button to continue with their ad’s service. The button to continue with your MySpendingPlan^TM account is at the bottom in much smaller letters.

Create a New Spending Plan

When creating a new spending plan you can name it and choose the ‘template.’ Your two options are Home Finances and Life Events. I chose Home Finances since I will be setting up a personal budget rather than planning for a specific event.

This screen also has it’s fair share of ads, both in link and image format: I’m getting the impression that this program might be fairly ad heavy.

To complete the setup of your new spending plan, you’ll go through 7 different steps: Intro, Interview, Accounts, Income Sources, Envelopes & Groups, Bills, Envelope Budgeting, and Assign Money.

Interview

The first question in the “Interview” asks you when was the last time that you reviewed your insurance needs. Ah, here come the opportunities for them to upsell you to services.

Interestingly enough, the second question asked about checking accounts. After entering that I already have a checking account, it suggests that open a free checking account with Washington Mutual.

For those that don’t know, Washington Mutual no longer exists — it was bought by JP Morgan Chase Bank almost a whole year ago. While not a big deal, this doesn’t exactly instil much confidence in MySpendingPlan^TM.

Other questions that it asked were focused on saving acounts, mortgages, selling or buying a home, etc.

Accounts

The Accounts sections is pretty straight forward.  In a pretty intuitive way, you simply add the bank accounts that you have.

For those who don’t like to have third parties know their financial information (like bank account numbers), you’ll be glad to know that MySpendingPlan^TM doesn’t ask for them.

Income Sources

In the same manner as before, you’ll then enter all the sources of your family’s income.

You must enter the date of the next paycheck, a title, the amount, and then choose the frequency that that paycheck will be coming in (monthly, weekly, etc.). You are also able to add notes if you desire to do so.

Groups & Envelopes

The next setup step is to create all of your spending groups and envelopes. Groups are major categories of spending (e.g. Food) and Envelopes are more specific categories of spending within the Groups (e.g. Groceries).

I actually like this section quite a bit. It allows you to create your own custom envelopes that work best for you. This is a key part to any effective budgeting software — the ability to create and manage spending categories that are tailored to your personal spending habits.

MySpendingPlan^TM offers a good number of existing groups and envelopes for you to work with (which you can edit), but you can also add your own by clicking New Group or New Envelope at the bottom of the screen if needed.

I received an error (see the screenshots below) when adding a new envelope that said I had to have a budget amount for the envelope. I had assumed that the assigning of budget amounts would be in a later step since it didn’t require me to set a budget amount when I was editing the other envelopes. Perhaps a small glich?

A Note About Speed – When you click just about anything within MySpendingPlan^TM there is about a 2 to 4 second delay before the action is completed. During the delay you see this icon: . I grew to hate that icon.This delay became very painful as I was editing only a few different envelopes. It was slow enough, that I even checked my internet connection to see if I didn’t have a good connection (but the connection was strong).

I don’t know if this delay is going to be standard for every click or if it is only apparent during these setup steps, but if it continues it will be a HUGE let down and probably enough for me to never use the program.

*Update: I noticed throughout the application that not all clicks had such a long delay (but most of them did). The drop down boxes, for example, had no delay at all.

Bills

Here you can enter all of your “fixed” bills or expenses that you know that you’ll have each month, week, etc.

While this step is certainly easy and intuitive within the software, I personally found it a bit tedious after a while. Part of this was due to the delay between clicks and the completion of the action (about 2 seconds).

Hopefully, however, this is something that will save a good amount of time once it’s set up properly.

Envelope Budgeting

In this section you set your monthly budget for all your different envelopes or spending categories.

*A Note about Envelope Budgeting – This is certianly something that MySpendingPlan^TM has done right. The time-tested budgeting method knows and envelope budgeting is probably the most effective way to manage your finances. The act of putting certain amounts of money into different envelopes (with either physical money or tracking it electronically) and then spending out of those “envelopes” encourages you to 1. plan your budget well and then 2. hold yourself responsible for all spending that occurs. I’ve found that this action alone has the greatest affect on personal spending and the way we manage our finances.

MySpendingPlan^TM allows you to enter your budget amounts in two different ways: manually or with their Auto-Assign feature. If you choose to do it manually, you simply type in your budget amounts on the right side of the screen. You can tab between entries, BUT you still have to wait through the “refresh” delay (about 2 to 3 seconds) before moving on the next one. I tried to tab through them quickly while editing the amounts, but once the refresh was over, it changed all the newly edited numbers back to what they were before. This was extremely annoying.

You can avoid this headache by deleting the envelopes you know you wont use. But either way, you’re spending time waiting for the “refresh” delay while deleting envelopes or when entering your budget amounts.

I also chose to try out the Auto-Assign feature. My results were less than stellar, although this may be partly my fault. In the envelope setup section, I didn’t delete all of the envelopes that I don’t use. Had I only included envelopes that I use, the Auto budget may have worked out a bit better. As it stands, it budgeted either $1, $60, or $100 for almost every category (except for Bills since I already set an amount for those).

I don’t, for example, think I need to budget $100 each month on Shoes, but only $60 each month of Auto Fuel. Basically you’re going to need to go over each envelope and set individual amounts anyway.

This is not a bad thing since it wouldn’t really be your budget if you didn’t set it anyway right? The Auto-Assign feature might work better in future months (if it goes off of your past spending habits), but I don’t see why you would use it to start out with.

MySpendingPlan^TM does encourage you to use a zero-based budget (allocating each dollar of your income to expense). This is a very effective way to budget, forcing you to have plan for each dollar that comes into and out of your pocket.

Assign Money

The seventh and final step is to assign the funds from your income to the budgets that you just set for the month.

MySpendingPlan^TM explains that the figures you enter in this step will be remembered for a “funding template” that can be used in the future to fund the envelopes more quickly and easily.

Just as before, you can choose to enter the numbers manually or by using the Auto-Assign Money button. The entering of the data in the section, however, is MUCH easier and quicker than in the envelope budgeting section. Here you can tab through the boxes and enter the data without any delay at all.

I again tried the Auto-Assign feature. I found that the system did auto-assign some allocations for certain paychecks correctly, but other’s didn’t make much sense. For example, it said I should use $100 from our first paycheck of the month to pay for my electricity bill (good because it’s due on the 10th). But it also said that I shouldn’t use any money from my first paycheck for groceries for the month (bad because we need to eat food to survive the first 15 days of the month).

I also noticed that when changing the numbers around, the ‘remaining’ number didn’t change accordingly (probably just a small bug).

Fund the Envelopes

After the initial setup steps, you are asked to fund your envelopes.

Again, you can do it manually or have MySpendingPlan^TM do it for you using the ‘funding templates’ that you just set up.

A Small Bug – When I tried to have them Auto-Fund the envelopes, I got the following two errors on different pages. When I tried to select which template to use:

I then went back a page and got this error when I clicked the Auto-Fund button for the second time:

I should note that MySpendingPlan^TM is still in Beta, so some errors and bugs like these are to be somewhat expected. After clicking Transactions > Fund Envelopes at the top, I was then able to successfully fund the envelopes.

A Overview of MySpendingPlan.com

The main view in MySpendingPlan^TM is something called My Big Picture.  At the top, you have icons for other areas including My Big Picture, Setup Wizard, Envelopes, Accounts, Income Sources, Bills, Tasks, Shopping Lists, Savings Goals, and Reports.

The Setup Wizard, Income Sources, and Bills are essentially the same as when we used them set them up so we wont go over those.  We will, however, briefly go over each of the others to give you an overall view of what MySpendingPlan^TM has to offer.

My Big Picture

My Big Picture, as the name suggests is a dashboard of sorts that displays all your information in one place.  Here’s a screenshot:

Here you can see your envelope balances and your spending for each.  You can also see your bank account balances, upcoming bills, tasks in progress, savings goals, news, a chart (I got an error instead of a chart), and of course, a Save More box (their opportunity to make money through ads) along with a couple other items.

I like that you can edit what shows up to a certain degree.  I thought I read somewhere that you can move these boxes around, but I couldn’t get it to work.  You can, however, minimize or close boxes that you don’t want showing up.  They don’t allow you, however, to close the Save More box.  Not a big surprise.

In general, I’m not too impressed with what I’m seeing here. It provides a couple good pieces of information (mostly your spending), but you really can’t do much from this screen.

Accounts

The Accounts area lets you actually edit your accounts and transactions.  By hovering over an account, you can choose to edit your account or view, edit, or create transactions.  Since this is where you’ll spend a good chunk of your time, let’s take a look at it:

Not much to look at yet, but we’ll change that.  It looks like you can change the date range to view as well as how many transactions to show on a page (a nice feature).

What I wasn’t too impressed with, however, was the Kontera add that was embedded in the page.  You know those sites that have those (in my opinion) really annoying advertisement links that pop up as you scroll over them?  It looks like MySpendingPlan^TM is using them as a source of income:

If an ad for “Account Balance” information isn’t helpful, I don’t know what is.  (I hope you can sense my sarcasm.)

Adding Trasactions

Adding and editing transactions in MySpendingPlan^TM is very simple.  But again, just because it’s easy to do, doesn’t mean that it’s effective or efficient. On average, each transaction took me about 30 seconds to enter in.  And that was only entering in the minimum requirements (date, payee, amount and envelope).  That information should be able to be entered in about 5 seconds (at least it’s that way with many other effective personal finance software applications).

It takes longer to add a transactions for two main reasons: 1. more clicks than necessary are required to complete a transactions entry and 2. there’s the now all-to-familiar delay between clicks and completion of the action.  For example, here’s a compilation of different screenshots  (of the “delay circle”) that I took while entering only 1 transaction:

I hope that I’m making my point clear.  Editing transactions in MySpendingPlan^TM is simply to tedious and time consuming.

Envelopes

While this is fairly self explanatory, I thought I’d cover it anyway.  The Envelopes area shows your envelopes with their corresponding Budgets, Payments, Deposits, and Balances.  You also have a little bar graph that, I assume, fills up as you spend through the month (although I’ve entered a few transactions for this month and don’t see anything).

Tasks

Next is the Task Planner.  Not much to mention here either, other than it could help you keep track of your tasks if you put them into the system.  While this isn’t a groundbreaking feature, it’s a nice one to have.

Shopping Lists

…is Coming Soon!  I’ll be sure to update this section when MySpendingPlan^TM has it up and running.

Savings Goals

This is one area that I like.  It allows you to set specific savings goals and tracks your progress towards it.  For example, I put in mine that I want to have $10,000 saved up in my House Down Payment envelope by December 15th.  There’s a Spending Ticker (bar graph) that shows your progress.

Savings goals in this sections should also show up in the My Big Picture area as well.

Reports

The Reports area of MySpendingPlan^TM has two main categories for it’s reports:  Income and Spending Reports and Bills and Tasks Reports.  There are a total of 10 different reports.

Here’s some screenshots of the reports.

I couldn’t get the view to change at all, despite my efforts at changing the Change Zoom settings.  As such I had to scroll to see much/any data.  Again, something I’m sure they’ll fix before getting out of Beta (or maybe it just doesn’t like Firefox as a browser).   Also, the reports come in either Report (table) form, a pie graph, or a bar graph.  The bar graphs look like basic Excel-produced graphs.

In short, the Reports section left much to be desired.

MySpendingPlan Price

The main thing that MySpendingPlan^TM has going for it is the price.  MySpendingPlan^TM is completely free.

MySpendingPlan Ads

After reading this review and seeing all the screenshots, you may not feel that the MySpendingPlan^TM ads is that big of deal (and it may not be).  But I should point out that the screenshots throughout this review didn’t include any of the ads.  For that reason I thought it prudent to show you the influence that the advertisements will have when using MySpendingPlan^TM.

Here’s a screenshot of a typical page:

The areas in red are advertisement areas (the area on the right is often a picture or motion ad as well).  This may, or may not bother you.  There were also some other areas containing ads:

• A Save More area at the top of the My Big Picture page.
• The “interview” when you first setup (this is nothing more than an opportunity to refer you to different services).
• The large advertisement for connecting to Realtor when you first signed up.
• The Kontera ads in the text (I only saw this once, so I don’t know how much they’ll use it).

Now, I’m not saying that MySpendingPlan^TM shouldn’t offer these advertisements.  If it weren’t for revenue that they made off of these ads, they wouldn’t be able to provide the software for free.

But I personally think that MySpendingPlan^TM is too ad heavy for the functionality that you’re getting.  It almost seems as though they’ve focused more on getting the ads in front of you than on creating a truly effective and quick solution to help you manage your finances better.

Conclusion

MySpendingPlan^TM offers their online personal finance software for free — but it comes with a price: time and a lot of advertisements.

While the budgeting methodology that MySpendingPlan^TM uses (the envelope-based budget), the overall offering of MySpendingPlan^TM is inferior to many other solutions on the market.  The main complaint I had about MySpendingPlan^TM is the fact that almost every action took considerably longer than it should have.  This longer time is a result of a nasty delay after the click of the mouse (in many instances) and the fact that the way you enter data (transactions for example) is simply takes too many clicks of the mouse to perform.  In short, the user interface needs quite a bit of improvements in order for it to be quick and effective.

The thought did enter my mind a couple times, however, that considering that their revenue comes from advertisments that you see while using the program, it could be possible that they don’t necessarily want you to do your work quickly.  The longer you spend in their program, the more face time their advertisments get.  Just a thought.

As mentioned above, MySpendingPlan^TM offers a good deal of ads — too many for my tasts.  And while, for the most part, they weren’t overly intrusive, I got the feeling that MySpendingPlan^TM was first an ad generator and second a personal finance tool to help you budget better and more effectively.

They’re still in Beta, so I’m sure many improvements are yet to be made.  I look forward to seeing some of those improvements.  But for now, I’d recommend looking elsewhere.  I see no reason to recommend MySpendingPlan^TM over other free services, especially with the latest improvements that Mint’s made (custom categories, better budget, better graphs, unintrustive ads, etc.)

Weekly Envelope is a budget planner that uses the envelope budgeting methodology to a certain degree and adds a little bit of a twist in there.  Weekly Envelope is a free service that’s designed to help you make sure that you don’t spend more than you bring in.

I’m a huge fan of the envelope budgeting system, so I’m fairly excited to take a look at Weekly Envelope.  Let’s dive in.

Getting Started with Weekly Envelope

After clicking you simply input your information to sign up for an account.  As you can see in the image below, they don’t ask for much, allowing you to take a very anonymous approach if you wish to do so.  Those that don’t feel comfortable having a third party know their personal and banking information will feel comforted by the fact Weekly Envelope doesn’t ask for anything of the sort.

I wasn’t sure what the “Family Members” section was for.  I assumed it has something to do with setting up the envelopes later.  It turns out that you must enter the members of your family in this area in order to set up your profile (and input income) a few steps later.  A little clarification or tooltip might have been nice.

Profile Setup

Overview

The first of six steps in the profile setup wizard gives a quick overview of how you’ll set up the system.  It mentions that working with Weekly Envelope involves two steps: creating a financial plan and executing that plan.  Simple enough.  Our financial plan, according to Weekly Envelope, consists of Income, Expenses, and Financial Goals.  Also simple.  So far so good.

Income

In the second step, you input your family’s income.  From what I can tell they’ve covered all the major sources and intervals of income that you could have.  However, those that work on commission or have an varying source of income may find it a little difficult to use the system.

Expenses

The third step consists of entering all of your known expenses.  You can do this easily by clicking the (add expense) button and entering the expense information.  While this certainly isn’t difficult, it does get time consuming since you have to submit and wait for a new page to come up after every single expense.  I quickly got tired of inputing the information (although budgeting is suppose to be work right?).

Balance

Step four asks you to verify your “Balance”  I’m assuming this is meant to be the current balance of your bank account.  Again, a little clarification would have been nice.  I input what our current bank balance is.

Goals

The fifth step is the Goal section. Here you can add and modify your financial goals (buy a new car, build up an emergency fund, etc.).  By default they have Emergency Fund as a goal.  A great goal that everyone should have.  You can edit the goal by clicking “Modify Goal.”

This is a nice little function.  It allows you to put the amount of the goal, how much you have saved so far, and when you want to achieve that goal.  You can then input how much you want to save each month/week/whatever to accomplish the goal.  They also have an ‘Auto’ option that will fill in this number, but I couldn’t get it to work.

Back on the goal page, it gives me this nice little goal graph:

Apparently I need to save $140 each week in order to meet my goal to have a $5,000 emergency fund saved up  by the end of this year.

They offered a number of suggested goals (home appliance, home repair, and vacation among others).

Finished

The sixth step is simply a pat-on-the-back step.  You’re presented with this congratulations screen:

It says that I’ve input all the info I need to for now, and that the system will calculate an affordable amount of weekly expenses.  This has a bit of a hands-off feel to it that I’m not sure what I think about yet.  I don’t know if I like the idea of having some number that’s given to me through some unknown calculation be my sole guide for spending.  *I’m sure you could easily figure out the where the number comes from (which they even explain on their blog), but my guess is the majority of people will just take the number and run with it.

I’m personally more of a fan of being very cognizant of exactly how your budget works and how it is that your income and expenses relate to each other.

“Execution” in Weekly Envelope

After clicking on “Fill Expenses” on the final step of setup, this is was you’re presented with:

My first thought? Cluttered and unclear.

After looking over it a little bit, however, it became more clear that this was basically my financial “plan” for this week (Aug. 10th – Aug. 16th).

Since they didn’t do the greatest job of demonstrating or teaching what all this information is, I’ll go through each section and try to (briefly) explain it.

This is fairly straight forward.

I think the best thing for you to do in order to see what these links do is to click around and see for yourself.

Now this is the part that seemed especially cluttered to me:

After looking over it a for a bit, you’ll find that on the left is the listing of days of this week.  Today (you’ll see that it’s highlighted) is Tuesday.  Under each day there is a list of a few items. One is the amount of “disposable” income that I am allowed to spend that day.  This is shown as “From envelope.“  On that same line are the family members (Chance and Spouse) and the amount they’ve spent that day.  You can enter what you spend that day by clicking on the edit icon ().  You’ll see the following screen:

You can enter your transaction as it shows (the freedom of format here leads me to think that you could easily end up with difficult to read/remember expense information).

The amount spent is taken out of the daily allotted amount.

You’ll also see other line items that are basically the planned or scheduled expenses.  In the screenshot above, for example, I am supposed to transfer $600 to my Emergency Fund today in order to meet the goal that I set.  I’m also suppose to spend $30 on Fuel today and $250 on my student loan on Friday.

You can click the edit icon on either of these line items to put in the amount that you actually spent.  As an example, if I spent $25 on Fuel, it would reflect the spending in the following manner:

Where it gets a little more tough, however, is when you start deviating from your scheduled spending (which you most certainly will).

Admittedly, I’ve probably not given this screen the detailed walkthrough that it really needs in order for you to be effective with it.  I believe, however, that the best way for you to get a feel for how this system works is to click around and play with it yourself.

“Plan” in Weekly Envelope

If you click on the Plan tab, you’re presented with the following screen:

The top section consists of your family’s income, with the option to edit.

The middle section shows the family expenses, the financial goals, and the amount in the envelopes (what you have left over).

The bottom section gives an overview of your weekly budget and how much you have left over in your envelopes.

Again I get the feeling that I’m presented with a bunch of information, but with little guidance as to what it all means.  This is particularly true of the middle section.

“Goals” in Weekly Envelope

The Goals tab is one of the only sections of the software that I actually liked.

It was clear and concise.  It shows you exactly what your goal is, how far along the way you are to acheiving it, and exactly what you need to do next week to accomplish that goal.

“Reports” in Weekly Envelope

There are three reports offered in Weekly Envelope.  I had somewhat expected them to be much like other reports in other personal finance software applications (spending graphs, envelope balance reports, etc.).  They were a bit different than expected:

The Planning Accuracy report is kind of fun to look at, but I don’t see how this helps you much in managing your finances (except to maybe help you set realistic amounts when budgeting).

Also, let me translate the last report:  “Expense accumulations and goal savings” = The balance of your spending categories (what you have left to spend in different categories).

Conclusion

The envelope budgeting method is a very good, very simple financial management methodology to follow.  You get income, you set aside money into different categories (envelopes) and then spend from those allotted amounts.

It seems as though Weekly Envelope is trying to appeal to the person that simply wants a program to tell them what they can spend each day and week (which practice is fundamentally flawed in my opinion).  While Weekly Envelope uses the simple budgeting methodology, they seem to have complicated it quite a bit (possibly by trying to make it even more simple than it is).  I have two main complaints about Weekly Envelope:

The first turnoff for me was the interface.  It seemed cluttered, unclear, and a bit unprofessional.   If you spend some time with the program, I’m sure that you’ll get the hang of it and know how to easily manage the system.  But it was clear that some big improvements could be made in the way information was presented.

Also, after you input your information, it calculates all the figures in the background and seemingly spits out some magical numbers that you are to follow.  They are simple calculations, but they’ve ‘mystified’ something that was quite straight forward to begin with.  Even while I’m inputting the transaction information into the system, I don’t get a clear sense of exactly how those transactions effect and relate to the rest of the system.  It feels more as though my budget is running me, rather than me running my budget.

Apparently I missed something with Weekly Envelope.  I’ll be the first to admit, that I didn’t quite catch the vision.  Had I had some Ah-ha moment, my experience may have been different.

It’s free, so if you have some extra time on your hands, give it a try.  Otherwise, I’d suggest going with a more proven system.

This new release (2.0) reportedly has many new features and improvements over the previous edition.  It is said to give you “More Security and Reliability, More Control, and More Speed.”

*Note: This is a review of CommonCents 2.0.  There has since been a new version (3.0) released which states the following NEW features:

• Reminders and Notifications
• Goal Setting and Tracking
• Improved Financial Reports and Graphs
• Streamlined Importing Functionality
• Multiple Document Attachment
• Archiving Capabilities
• Export Manager

Version 2.0 Features

As a quick summary, here are some of the features that CommonCents 2.0 states on their website:

• Enhanced Data Encryption
• Local or Remote Storage (convenience for some, more security for others)
• Backup and Recovery Manager
• Log Manager (to help with customer support)
• Options Manager (with some added functionality such as auto-assigning envelopes for payees)
• Enhanced Budget Manager (can now allocate income by % or $)
• Enhanced Scheduling Options
• Improved Importing Functionality
• Payee Manager
• Hot Keys (to help with data entry)
• Improved Transfer Options

CommonCents 2.0 (enDevelopment’s flagship product) has stuck with the same envelope-style budget and still uses the checkbook-style register.

It appears that CommonCents 2.0 was a big improvement upon the previous version with quite a few features added.

How Does CommonCents 2.0 stand up against the competition?  Let’s dig in and find out.

My Experience with CommonCents 2.0

I took my first impression of CommonCents from the website advertising the product.  It was very clean, shiny, and web 2.0-ish.

Interested in a quick overview of the personal finance software, I chose to check out the Demo.  It was insightful and gave me a quick feel for the application. I was somewhat surprised to see that the actual application didn’t have the same look and feel as the website (not as shiny or polished).

Downloading CommonCents

For those Mac lovers out there, I’m sorry to say that CommonCents is currently only offered for the Windows platform.  You can, however, use an emulator (like I did) to run it just fine.

The download process went pretty smoothly.  It took a total of maybe 2 minutes to go through the process.  The screenshots detail most of the steps taken.

Upon launch of the program I was reminded that I have 60 days to use the software before I have to buy a license.

Setting Up CommonCents 2.0

Once you register and get your first glance at the application you’re greeted with a welcome screen with some suggestions to help you get started.

They suggest 3 things: 1. view some online tutorials, 2. read the “Introduction” in the help files, and 3. use the “Preparation Checklist” to get organized.  I like that CommonCents kind of walks you through the process and doesn’t leave you staring at an empty piece of software wondering what to do.

Having said that, it also causes me to wonder if the system isn’t quite as simple as they originally made it out to be (I need a preparation checklist to use the software?). I did as they suggested and checked out the resources.  Although I don’t know if they are absolutely necessary, many will find them helpful when getting started.

CommonCents Main Screen

As you can see (click image to enlarge), CommonCents consists of one main screen that is basically your financial control center.

Along the top are buttons for the different “managers” that you’ll use throughout your budgeting.  These include: Vault, Account, Envelope, Income, Budget, Report, Reconcile, and Backup managers.

The main section of this screen is a register for your transactions that looks much like a digitized checkbook register (in fact, it reminded me a bit too much of my checkbook balancing days and brought back some bad memories).

To the right we have a listing of the different envelopes we are tracking in our budget (you can edit which envelopes appear here – more on that later) along with their current balances.

At the bottom is a listing of our different bank accounts and their balances.

First Impression

My first thought after getting into the software dealt with the disconnect between the appearance of the software and the look and feel of the website.

Maybe I incorrectly expected the two designs to be similar, but I found the software application to a bit too grey and unfriendly.

This is just a personal observance (and preference for more friendly applications) and shouldn’t have much effect on your budgeting effectiveness.

Customizing Your Budget Envelopes

This isn’t exactly the order that CommonCents tells you to go to get started with the software,but this is how I see it making the most sense.  Start first by customizing your categories (envelopes) the way you’ll use it.

The reason I say this is because once you start adding accounts with opening balances, you’ll want to split the amount into your envelopes to start budgeting.

To edit the envelopes click on the Envelope Manager button.  I personally found the need to do quite a of customizing with the envelopes to cater to the way I like to budget.

I thought that there were a number of envelopes that clearly should have been child categories to certain parents (for example, Rent and Home Repair could be child categories to Household).  At the very least, I didn’t think that some categories were grouped together as nice as they could have been.

I ran into an error when I tried adding a ‘Personal/Entertainment’ envelope because there was already an ‘Entertainment’ envelope.  The error is fine, but it’s the way the error was displayed that I thought was interesting.  It said:

“The changes you requested to the table were not successful because they would create duplicate values in the index, primary key, or relationship.  Change the data in the field or fields that contain duplicate data, remove the index, or redefine the index to permit duplicate entries and try again.”

I only bring this up to show that there could maybe be a little more thought put into the user experience here.  For those not familiar with computers or databases, that sentence makes very little sense and leaves them a little wide-eyed.  Remove the index? Primary key? Field?  Sure, I know what those are, by my mother sure doesn’t.

A simple “That category already exists, please either name it differently or delete the other category.” would have worked just fine.

The only other gripe I have about the envelopes section of CommonCents is the way that they are ordered by default.  It’s alphabetical (which is fine), but there is no clear hierarchy to the envelopes or any convention to help you see the different envelope groups (parent categories) more clearly.

This may be due to the fact that I’m used to YNAB’s budget which clearly shows the relationship of each envelope to the next.  Even a simple ‘Tab in’ for each child category would help it out a lot visually.

I will say, however, that I like that CommonCents allows you to add and remove custom categories as you wish.  I feel this is an essential function to any effective budget.

Setting Up Accounts

If you wish to add any accounts, you can do so by clicking the Account Manager at the top.

I decided to stick with the default Cash, Checking, Credit Card, and Savings accounts they give by default.  After clicking on the account at the bottom, enter a starting balance in the register.

Being that it uses envelope budgeting, you will need to set up an initial budget (allocate to your budget envelopes) with this opening balance.  You can start dividing up your opening balance by clicking the button.  This is where the ‘preparation checklist’ will come in handy if you chose to fill it out.

You can see in the screenshots below that I allocated the “income” into different envelopes (rent, savings, etc.).

I found as I was going back and forth between adding new envelopes and splitting the money in different categories, that there was a good 2-3 second delay after I hit the Split button.  (I often clicked a second time, thinking that I hadn’t clicked it the first time… but I had.) *Note: A user recently informed me that this delay is no longer occurring. Thank you CommonCents!

I found that this delay continued for each time I edited a transaction and quickly became quite annoying.

Adding & Editing Transactions

Adding Transactions Manually

While adding transactions manually wasn’t necessarily difficult, it just wasn’t as quick as I would have hoped.  I like that they allow you to tab to each new area of the transaction.  This helps immensely.

For a while I was frustrated by the fact that I had to get the mouse and click for each new transaction that I entered.  I then remembered the mentioning of ‘Hot Keys’ and looked it up in the Help menu.  By typing ALT-N, a new transaction will be initiated.  Remember this if you’re entering a large number of transactions! You’ll be glad you did.

I also liked that you can change the width of the columns in the register to best suite your needs.  Except, I couldn’t change the width of the category column.  Being that some of the categories are relatively long, you can’t see the whole category without clicking the drop down arrow.  This plays a big part since you must start typing the category using the parent category and can’t type in the name of the child category.

For example, as you can see in the image below, after typing “Personal” and arrowing down, I wasn’t able to tell which cateogory I was selecting.  I was looking for: Personal/Fun Money:Hers

Is this a deal breaker? Probably not, but it’s the culmination of little things like this that can make an application more difficult to use.

Importing Transactions

You can import transactions into CommonCents 2.0 by clicking on ‘Managers’ at the top, then selecting ‘Import Manager.”  The import manager opens up and you can select which account you want to import into and then upload the file.

Also, enDevelopment Team: May I suggest having an icon for the Import Manager at the top since that will likely be a very frequently visited manager?

I ran into a little trouble here.  The CommonCents documentation states that it can import the widely accepted .QFX format.  But when I tried to upload the .QFX file, it gave me this error:

Now I don’t know if this was just a fluke, one-time thing or if it really only accepts .OFX files for the current time.  I tried multiple times and couldn’t get it to work.  Unfortunately, my bank doesn’t offer an .OFX file download.  I’ll be sure, however, to check back in the future to see if it has been fixed.

If the importer works as advertised, however, it sounds like it may be pretty nice.  I like that you have the option of editing the transactions before they go into the register.

The Income & Budget Manager

Much of your budgeting will be done in the Income Manager and the Budget Manager.  You can set up different sources of income in the Income Manager so that when you get paid, all you have to do is go into the income manager, select the income (change the amount if necessary) and have it enter the income transaction.

The reason why it’s important to set up income sources like this is because you can tie them to the budget allocations that you choose.  By going into the Budget Manager you can set up different allocations of your income for each source of income.  See the screenshots:

The main thing that I don’t like about the budgeting functionality is that there are too many steps to move money between envelopes.  What this means is that in order to alter your budget throughout the month you have to go into the budget manager (or the individual income transaction) and edit the allocated amounts.

For example, say part way through the month I decide to take a little from my Restaurant envelope and put it into the Grocery envelope (because we want to eat healthier).  If I go the Budget Manager route, it takes me 8 clicks, two data entries, and two new windows to change the amount.  That’s a lot of clicking.  (*Note: a user recently informed me that it only takes 5 clicks now.)  Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just edit the envelopes straight from the envelope window at the right (and take only 2 clicks)?

*Update: You can use the Transfer Manager to move money between envelopes (which was easier and more intuitive), but this still required 9 clicks.

I’m personally one who monitors and (and sometimes alters) my budget on a weekly basis.  Having so many extra steps to change the amounts a little would get old real quick.

CommonCents’ Reports

CommonCents offers a number of different reports.  Although they may not be the reports you were expecting to see.  Most personal finance software has reports in the forms of bar graphs, pie charts, etc.  The CommonCents reports, however, are all simple data listings.  This, for example, is the Envelope Register Report (click to enlarge, if you wish):

This may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your preferences.  I like some of the reports they offer, but also recognize the benefit of some good graphical reporting when trying to visualize our spending and areas in which we can improve.

For your reference, here is their list of reports:

Other Managers

There are a number of different ‘Managers’ that you can use to manage the system.  In order to not bore you with the details of each, here’s a quick summary and screenshot of each:

Reconcile Manager: A tool to help you reconcile your bank statements with your CommonCents software.

Merge Manager: A nice feature that allows you to permanently merge (and alter all previous transactions) two envelopes.  You probably wont use this much, but when you need to, you’ll be glad they have it.

Transfer Manager: Allows you transfer money between accounts or between envelopes.  While this is nice, it would be nice to have that kind of functionality using a transaction in the register or using the envelope window at the right.

Memorized Transaction Manager: Allows you to schedule transactions.

Payee Manager: You can edit the payees that CommonCents has remembered for you.

Log Manager: Keeps a log of your activities to be used if you need support.  The fact that they have this feature makes me wonder if they’re anticipating having problems?

Backup Manager: Nice feature and pretty self explanatory.

CommonCents 2.0 Price

Once your 60 day trial (a very generous trial length, by the way) is over you can purchase a license for continued use for $34.95.  This isn’t a bad price for an envelope budgeting package.

Although, in my personal opinion, I would rather flip the slightly larger bill for some of the better envelope solutions out there.

Conclusion

CommonCents is a less expensive alternative to some of the other envelope budgeting systems.  The envelope budgeting method is a time-tested method to manage your money and works extremely well.  It causes you to be responsible for each dollar you bring in and each dollar that goes out.  I like that CommonCents reinforces the envelope principles and a zero based budget.

I found, however, that CommonCents wasn’t quite as polished, simple, or quick as other similar systems.  There were numerous little areas that needed improvement, and when they’re all taken into account, the program as a whole is little too tedious for my tastes.  Issues such the .QFX importing issue, the transaction editing,  and the budgeting functionality (among others) were all somewhat of a turnoff.

For those, however, that have learned their way around the CommonCents software and like the way it functions, its envelope budgeting will be highly effective.  They have a great 60 day trial, so you may as well give it a try to see if you like it.

While not a ’shiny’ as Mint, with some good functionality and even some new features, Buxfer has some real potential.  Does it have what it takes to give Mint the boot?  Read on to find out.

*Note: Since this review was written the founders of Buxfer has stopped supporting it and have both started working at Facebook. It looks like the service is still available to use, but some are saying that the site isn’t as stable as it once was. I imagine it will only be a matter of time till it’s shut down completely.

A Brief Buxfer History

One thing that I like about Buxfer is that it was created by (and appears to still be run by) a pretty small team.  One of the co-founders, Ashwin Bharambe created Buxfer (apparently a mix between the words ‘bucks’ and ‘transfer’) to better track the large amount of “IOU’s” floating around while he was in college at Carnegie Mellon.

Shortly thereafter he teamed up with Shashank Pandit and they launched the Buxfer website in December, 2006.  Since then they’ve received some funding from Y Combinator as well as a few angel investors.

Getting Started with Buxfer

After clicking the “Sign Up for Free” button on the main Buxfer site, you simply enter your email address and desired password.  You will need to verify your email within 24 hours, but they allow you to continue without verifying right then (thankfully since a day later I still have received the verification email from them).

You’re then presented a screen to choose a membership plan.  There three options:

Basic: Free

Plus: $1.79 / month

Pro: $2.79 / month

As you can see in the chart (click to enlarge), you get quite a bit of functionality with the free version.  The upgraded versions basically allow you more accounts, budgets, financial projections, etc.  You also get ‘Priority customer support.”  Only time will tell if this ‘Priority’ support will be needed.

*Update:  See ‘The Need to Upgrade’ near the end of this review.

I chose the basic membership.

Setup Your Accounts

After logging in you’re asked if you want to have your transactions automatically sychronized or manually enter them.  You’ll see in the screenshot that to the side of ‘Manual Entry’ they show that you have the option of  the IOU tracking.  I’m not sure yet if that means that you must choose to manually enter your transactions in order to have that functionality or not.  I surely hope not.

I personally believe that manually entering in your transactions helps with money management, but being that I thought most people would choose to have their transactions synchronized automatically, I too chose that option.

You simply find your bank, enter your online login info, and you’re off.  After picking which account you want used, it downloads the transactions.

Set Budgets

Buxfer then takes you back to the account setup screen and has you enter in some budget limits on your spending.  As you can see in the screenshot, Buxfer aparently categorized some of my transactions wrong because I certainly spent more than $43.24 on food last month. This is, however, to be expected until you go in and re-categorize the transactions.  The way some of those transactions appear, you can’t expect these software programs to be perfect.

Schedule Bills

I put in a scheduled bill for rent for next month.  I’m not sure if it makes this a recurring bill or not.  Apparently by entering a bill, I will get an email reminder about it.

When I hit submit, I got this error message.  Fyi, you can only put dates in the following format: 25 Jun 2009.  Not very user friendly in my opinion.  Also when I hit close, it exited out of the account setup rather than putting me back where I could fix the date.

A small bug for sure, but something that hopefully will be fixed in the future.    (For those that made the same mistake, you can get back into the account setup by clicking ‘More’ then “Account Setup’ on the main Buxfer screen.

Setup Mobile

Buxfer offers a number of different mobile solutions to help you keep up on your finances on the go.  You can use your iPhone, Blackberry or other mobile device that has internet or have it communicate via text messages or via mobile email.  In order to work it via texts, you have to set it up with Twitter.  Being that I don’t have a phone with internet capabilities, nor a Twitter account (I know, I need to get with the times), I skipped this setup section.

I will say, however, that I like that Buxfers offers this many ways to communicate with Buxfer through mobile means.

Apps & Widgets

Buxfer also offers apps and widgets for Facebook, iGoogle, and Netvibes.  Nice.  Can I also put in a quick plug for a future Mac widget? 

Buxfer’s Interface

The Buxfer interface has a very clean, functional look.  Dare I say it reminds me of Gmail a bit (a good thing)?

At the top-left you have your accounts, tags, contacts, and groups.  Here you can add or change settings to these items.

The upper-middle portion of the interface offers different tabs for Summary, Add Transactions, Budgets, Reports, and More.  I’ll go through each one individually to give you an idea of what kind of functionality Buxfer has to offer.

Buxfer’s Accounts

I started with the Accounts screens (what you may consider the Transactions screen) because I needed to first re-categorize (or tag) the transactions that had been downloaded in order to better take advantage of the rest of the features.

The transactions section is pretty straight forward with standard Description, Amount, Balance, Tags, Account, and Date data points.  You can also sort the list by amount or date.  I also like that you can set the number of transactions that show up on the page to 10, 25, or 50.

I noticed that by default it downloaded around 230 transactions (going back about 3 months) from my bank by default.  First of all I wish I could have told it how many transactions or how far back in time to download.  This wouldn’t be that big of deal, however, if I could easily delete the end transactions that I don’t want to have to go through and categorize.    Unfortunately, the only way for me to get to the end of the list (that I can see) is to click the button repeatedly until I get to the end.  A “Go to Page X” option would be nice.

Once I whittled down my transactions list to a manageable 120 transactions, now was the task of re-tagging the transactions to make them actually mean something.

Adding (Custom) Tags

I went to the Tag area (top left, click on the tag icon) to add some custom tags (what you could also call a category) in order to make my budget mine.  Click on the symbol to open the Add Tags window.  Click the again to add a tag.  You can add a sub tag or a parent tag from here.  Relatively straight forward.

Editing Transactions

I went to town re-tagging the transactions.  To be frank I found the process a little more time consuming that I’d like.  It’s not that it’s super slow or that it’s difficult to do.  In fact, all you have to do is click on the “(no tags)” letters, a box pops up and you enter the tag.

As you type, it autofills with the tags you have set up for suggestions.  Very simple.  But it’s just not quite as responsive as I’d like (there’s a half a second delay between clicks).  This may not be a big deal for many of you, I just noticed it more since I was trying to re-tag a boatload of transactions.

I’ll say this much, it was enough for me to delete all of May’s transactions (rather than tag them) and only do June’s just because it took too long.

I do like, however, that you can set a tagging rule so that future similar transactions always are tagged as they’re downloaded.

Renaming Transactions

I also like that you can rename transactions and set rules so that similar transactions in the future will be renamed according to the rules.  See the screenshots for this process.

*Some transactions show up with the date as part of it.  I’m not sure how hard and fast the renaming feature will require the description to be.

General Editing

You can also edit the transaction in a number of different way by click on the description.  Other options include Mark as Transfer, Mark as Refund, Copy, Repeat, Split/Itemize, Attach a Note or File, and Delete.  You can also save/export in a number of file formats by clicking the button at the top right.

Buxfer’s Sychronizing

I feel that I wouldn’t be doing it justice if I didn’t cover, at least for a second, the method that Buxfer uses to synchronize your transactions.

As you can see, near the Synchronize button, it states, “Authentication information is stored offline on your computer.”  From what I’ve read, Buxfer uses the Google Gear’s technology to store your account authentication information on your own computer.  This way, it is more secure and you don’t have to “trust” Buxfer to hold and secure your account information.

There are some who don’t have any problem with services like Mint that hold your account info on their servers.  There are some that do.  For those that get a little nervous of the idea, Buxfer may be a better match for you.

Buxfer also offers two other options.  You can choose to have them sync transactions at night, in which case they will store your account info on their servers.  Or you can use a Firefox plug (Firebux) to do the syncing.

Buxfer’s Summary Tab

Buxfer’s main hub and the area where you’ll land when you first open the site is the Summary tab.  The Summary basically consists of an area showing a budget graph, another area showing your upcoming bills, and one showing an expense pie chart.  Below this top section is a listing of your latest transactions.

You can click the title of each section to be taken to its respective tab.

In the Budget area you can click on each Tag to be taken to that tag’s budget area that shows a spending graph and a list of those transactions.

In the Upcoming Bills area you can click on the title to see a calendar detailing all upcoming bills and to add Reminders.  Or you can click on the bill to edit it’s settings.

In the Monthly Expenses area you can click on the graph to be taken to the Reports area (more on that later).

Buxfer’s Add Transactions

If you choose to manually add transactions, Buxfer allows you to do so in the Add Transaction tab.  This opens a single transaction screen where you can add the details of one transaction at a time.

By click the button you get a screen allowing you add multiple transactions at once.  You can tab through the fields adding virtually all the info without touching your mouse.  This proves to be much faster if you have more than one transaction to add.

In addition, you have the ability to import transactions via a bank export files.  It appears that the following formats are accepted:  .qif, .qfx, .ofx, and .csv.

Buxfer’s Budget

The section that I view as one of the most important sections of any personal finance software is the budgeting area.  I place such importance on the budget because that’s usually the area that has the greatest effect on the spending and saving habits of the users.

So how does Buxfer’s budget stand up to the competition?  Well it depends on who you want to call the competition.  If you compare it to some of the highly effective envelope budgeting systems on the market, Buxfer doesn’t look so hot.  But if you compare it to other similar services (with similar budgeting functionality) like Mint, Quicken Online, iBank, and others, Buxfer is just as good, if not a little better.

Here’s a screenshot of the main budgeting page:

To the left you have the often-seen bar graph that ‘fills up’ as you spend throughout the month.  There is a line that indicated the date so you can see how well you’re doing at that given point in time.  To the right of the graph you have the current balance of the budget in each category (how much you have left to spend), your set limit, a rollover amount, and how much you’ve spent.

To the far right you can delete a budget for a category or pause it.  When I tried to pause one, however, it looks like it simply deleted it. Maybe they’re still working on that one.

The Rollover Budget Option

The reason that I like Buxfer’s budget better than some others is because Buxfer has the Rollover feature.

It looks as though they’re trying to take a page from the envelope budgeting methodology and include a feature that “rolls over” your budget balances from the previous month.

For example, if I have a monthly budget for Entertainment of $30 and I only spend $15 in May on Entertainment, then the following month I will have $45 to spend.  Likewise, if I have a $30 budget for Personal Care, but I spent $50 in May, then in June I only have $10 that I can spend (because a negative $20 was rolled over from last month).  See the screenshots for how this would look in Buxfer.

This feature has an envelope taste to it, and I like it.  It makes you more responsible for your spending, helps you to plan better, and allows you to build up amounts in anticipation of a large, future expense.  (Although it doesn’t do it near as well as YNAB does, I like that they are trying to implement the same ideas).

Unfortunately, however, Buxfer doesn’t facilitate nor encourage creating a zero-based budget (where you budget for every single dollar you earn).  This is a much more effective way to plan your spending and savings.

Dig Deeper

By clicking on each of the individual Tags in your budget you can dig deeper.  It opens up a Tags tab which shows you all of the transactions as well as a graph showing your expenses for that particular Tag.

Buxfer’s Reports

The Reports section of Buxfer consists of three different reports: An Income pie chart, an Expense pie char, and a Balance line graph.  By clicking on each section, you are shown only that graph and the transactions that pertain to the graph below.

As expected, you can click on sections (Tags) of the two pie charts (income and expenses) to drill down and see what expenses and transactions make up that section of the pie.  Pretty standard.

The Balance graph shows what your balance (the amount of money you have) has been on any given day.  Some may find it interesting to watch their balance go up and down with paychecks and expenses, but I didn’t see much use of it.

Track IOU’s with Friends

Buxfer has a pretty neat feature that some (especially that college aged) may find quite handy.  You can track what is owed to you, and what you owe others, through the Buxfer system.  It appears as though you need to invite friends in order to get them in the system to begin tracking the IOUs.

You can also receive a $1 credit towards membership upgrades for every friend that you refer.

Being that I don’t currently have any friends in the system, I’m unable to test this feature right now.  If anyone wants to become my friend, please let me know.

The Need to Upgrade

While I was setting up my budget in Buxfer I came across this error message:

I was on my 5th or 6th Tag on my budget when I got the prompt to upgrade.  I initially thought that I would be able to get away with quite a bit without having to upgrade, but this made me second guess.

I can certainly see Buxfer’s need to monetize their system.  And there will definitely be those who think that it’s worth the $1.79 or $2.79 per month.

I would have originally suggested that you just use the free version, but I believe that in order to have any kind of effective budget, you will need to budget WAY more than only 5 categories (ideally all of your spending would budgeted).  As such, I say if you’re going to seriously use Buxfer, you need to upgrade.

Is it worth the money?  Read the conclusion:

Buxfer Overall Conclusion

As a free tool, Buxfer is great.  It has nice functionality that goes a bit beyond other free solutions.  I like it’s budgeting function better than similarly designed systems, but it still pales in comparison to true envelope budgeting systems available.

I also like that Buxfer allows you to store your bank account information offline (on your computer) which seems a bit more secure than options like Mint.

If you’re going to use Buxfer as your main budgeting engine, than I highly suggest that you pay for the upgrades in order to actually make a budget that will have any kind of effect on your spending.  Looking from the standpoint that you’re paying for it (although it’s certianly not a lot), I don’t know that it’s worth it.   You can find much better solutions (that use true envelope and zero-based budgeting) on the market for a little more than a one year’s subscription to Buxfer’s upgraded options.  There are however, many that will likely find Buxfer a refreshing alternative to other free personal finance software solutions.

Does iBank have what it takes to send Quicken whimpering back to Intuit?  Or is it just another Mac-based financial app that looks pretty but that doesn’t quite get the job done? And how does iBank match up to other budgeting solutions available?  In this review, I hope to find out.

This review is for iBank version 3.4.2. There is a newer version (4.2.5) now available. I’ll have a revised review of the newest version up as soon as possible.

iBank’s New Features

When you first visit the website you’re introduced to some of the new features (or at least the ones that iBank is most proud of).  Here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge):

As you can see, there’s quite the list.  If you click on ‘Full Feature List’ at the middle of the page, you can access a complete list of all the features that iBank has to offer.

Some look like eye candy, but others look as though there has been some good thought put into designing the app.  I’m excited to put many of them to the test.

Downloading & Installing iBank

Downloading and installing iBank was a piece of cake.  All you do is download the file and drag the application into your applications folder.  It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Once you start iBank, it allows you to purchase it if you haven’t already done so.  I opted to ‘Use Demo.’  It says that you are allowed 75 transactions in the system before you have to purchase it although the website mentions a 30-day trial period.  I’m assuming it’s whichever comes first.

Setting Up iBank

Once inside of iBank I was presented with a nice ‘iBank Setup Assistant’ screen.  It showed me new features for iBank 3, gave me an option to create a ‘New Document, and provided some support features.  What I really liked is that they had a ‘Quick Start Guide’ (unlike the similar Cha-Ching application I recently reviewed).  Clicking the link downloaded an 18 page pdf file.

I found the quick start guide to be simple and easy to follow – just what a newbie will need.  I was a bit hesitant at first about reading 18 pages, but found that it uses large text and plenty of large pictures.  It’s an easy read and I highly suggest you check it out if this is your first time booting iBank up.  It will make the process a lot quicker.

I then chose, ‘New Document’ and saved a new iBank document to my desktop (you will likely want it somewhere more permanent if you intend on continuosly using it.  Double clicking the new document icon opens the iBank application.

Main iBank Window

As you can see, the main iBank window is clean and will feel very familiar to those used to using a Mac.  At the top you’ll see your options for adding bank accounts, charts, budgets, and more.  You’ll also see other tools such as Budget Monitor, Calculator and a couple others that I’ll go over later.

The left panel houses your bank accounts that you put into iBank as well as ways to “manage” your finances.

The middle section is the transaction window where you can see your transaction in either list, coverflow, or thumbnail view.

The bottom left houses a graphical representation of your expenses and the bottom right is where you enter your bank transactions manually.

Adding an Account

The Quick Start Guide does a good job of walking you through the basics of getting started.  After reading it, I basically followed the same steps, so what you read here is simply my experience with the process they laid out for me.

After clicking on the Account icon at the top left, you’re presented with a basic screen to input your account details such as name, beginning balance, account type, etc.  One feature here is the Min. Balance that allows you to put a minimum balance for the account.  If your balance goes below that point, you will get warned.

Since I will be inputting and importing transactions for purposes of the review, for my beginning balance I put what my bank balance was about 20 or transactions ago (if you don’t want to import all the transactions since your account’s inception, you may want to do the same).

Direct Downloading of Transactions

It then allowed me to choose to enable transaction downloading from my bank.

There are different schools of thought on this subject.  I personally believe that the act of manually inputting your transactions each weak or so reinforces your spending awareness and helps in the budgeting process.

I do, however, recognize the convenience of having transactions automatically downloaded.  I chose to allow it.

After inputting my username, password, account number and routing number, it wouldn’t connect to my bank.  This may be due to the fact that my bank is using some other username than the one I use to login online, or it may just not be working with my bank.

At any rate, I’ll update the post if/when I can get it to work.

Adding Transactions in iBank

Adding transactions in the list, thumbnail, or coverlfow view is pretty much the same.  It’s generally pretty simple and easy.  It’s not as fast as other applications that I’ve seen simply because you have click the + symbol for every new transaction.

This might not seem like a big deal, but when you’re inputting a bunch of transactions, it gets old (I only did about 10 transactions and I was sick of having to move to my mouse).

It’s a big improvement, however, on Cha-Ching’s transaction editor because you can actually tab through to each input field.  This allows you to input all the information you need to using only the keyboard.

I also like that the category auto fills as you type, but I noticed that you have begin typing the exact category in order to work.  For example, when I started typing “Meals” for the “Dining:Meals” category, it didn’t find it.

*Note:  Almost every time I tried to scroll through the categories while editing the transaction, it froze for about 8-10 seconds.  A small bug, that iBank will likely get fixed before too long.

Creating Custom Categories

I was pleased to see that you can create your own custom categories in iBank.  Your budget is something that’s personal to you, and as such, you need software that will allow you to create your own categories for spending.

Creating a category in iBank is fairly simple.  Just click on the Categories folder below the area where the Accounts are listed.  This opens a list of all the categories.  Click the + icon and add your own.  You can also choose it’s custom color to help you in your charts, etc. if you wish.

*An interesting feature that I found by accident:  When you input your category – if you put anything after a colon (:) it becomes a child category to the main category that you’re creating.

For example, I typed in “Fun Money: Hers” and it created a main category “Fun Money” and a child category “Hers.”  I like it.

Splitting Transactions

Another essential piece to any personal finance software is the ability to split transactions.  Doing so it iBank is fairly easy, although not quite as streamlined as other solutions I’ve seen.

A Thought about Coverflow and Thumbnail Views

It’s only my personal opinion, but I don’t see how the coverflow feature adds any value whatsoever to the financial application.  Sure, it’s pretty and fancy.  But what does it do to help me manage my finances better?  Nothing.

It is nice that iBank has some good looking icons already in the software for certain categories (and you can add your own using your iSight camera if you wish), which is an improvement upon Cha-Ching.  But the fact still stands that it’s a waste of time to worry about such things.

The only worthwhile application that I could see with this feature is to take a picture of your receipt and attach it to the transaction if you’re the kind that keeps track of receipts.  Oh, and the thumbnail view isn’t as bad, but still seems like it takes up too much space.  Just some thoughts.

iBank’s Charts

What is often called the reporting or analysis section of other personal finance software, iBank calls Charts.  And probably rightly so since it’s basically a number of charts that you can custom create.

You add a chart by clicking the Chart icon at the top left of the iBank appliation.

It asks you to create a name for your new chart and select the time frame and type of chart that you’d like.  Options are:

• Balance Sheet
• Capital Gains
• Custom
• Quick Summary
• ROI (Return on Investement)

I created a Quick Summary and was then given this chart (click to enlarge):

My first impression was: cluttered.  The graph itself was fine, but it was all the information in the panels around it that made me a little claustrophobic.

On this particular graph you can view the transactions for each category by double clicking it’s piece of the pie.  The middle section allows you to list which categories you’d like in your graph.

They also have an option to get a printout report of the chart you’ve selected.  By clicking Generate Report at the bottom it spits out a pretty official looking report.

In addition, you have the option of viewing your chart in the following ways: By Category, Through Time, Cateogry & Date, and Transactions.

I’ll let you be the judge on the charts section.  Overall, I wasn’t super impressed, but that’s just my personal opinion.

On a positive note, however, if you put in some time and created some good custom reports that you felt helped you better manage your money, iBank’s charts may be helpful.

iBank’s Budget

Now for what I feel is the most important section of any personal financial application – the budget.

I say this because this is where I feel most of the activities are that actually can have a great impact on the way that one manages their finances.  I’ve seen this done beautifully (the envelope method used by Mvelopes and YNAB) and I’ve seen it done very poorly (Mint comes to mind).

How does iBank’s budget stand up to the competition?  Let’s take a look.

Again, to add a budget you simply click on the Add Budget icon at the top left.  After naming your budget you are presented with the screen to enter in your budgeted amounts for each category.  There is a top section for Income and bottom section for Expenses. Simple enough.

To add a budget for a category, click the + symbol in the bottom of the respective windows.  You then change the category for the new expense (the default is Vacation: Lodging – not sure why) by clicking the category and selecting the one you want from the drop down menu.

You can make the expense be budgeted weekly, every two weeks, monthly, quarterly, or annually.  Double-click, or tab, to enter the amount.

A Note About Budgeting in this Manner

I wanted to quickly point out something about the method that iBank uses to help you budget.  In iBank’s budget (and most other financial applications for that matter) when you set up your budget you can choose only the categories that you want to budget for.  This is nice, customizable, and convenient right?  Well, yes and no. It’s convenient, but not very effective.

One of the main goals of a budget is to catch the money that’s falling through the cracks from untracked, forgotten, ignored, or unplanned-for expenses.  So when you aren’t tracking all of your spending in all of your categories, you can see how this problem is likely to continue.

That’s why I am such a proponent of the envelope budgeting methodology – because it forces you to be accountable for every dollar that you spend in every category.

So if you do choose to use iBank, may I suggest that you create a budgeted amount for each category that you spend out of.  This will take some extra discipline since it’s not encouraged much in iBank, but the result will be better money management.

iBank’s Budget Monitor

After having set up your budget, you’re now ready to use the Budget Monitor to keep up on your budget.

To open it up, simply click the Budget Monitor icon at the top.  You’re presented with a screen that shows you a bar graph for each category showing your spending (for whatever time frame you choose in the top right).

For some reason my Budget Monitor was quite small and cramped together (see picture).  You can (and probably will need to) resize the window and the columns to make it a bit more legible and eye-friendly.  It’s nice that you’re able to do so.

To be frank, I was actually somewhat dissapointed in the budgeting feature of iBank.

This commonly seen bar graph is fine (and I  like that iBank also includes the amount spent and budgeted figures to the right of the graph.  It illustrates how much you’ve spent in relation to your budgeted amount.

But if that’s all that it does, I don’t see how this truly reinforces the fact that if I spend too much in the entertainment category (which I did in the pictures above), I now have less money to spend in other categories.

Also the graph doesn’t do much to show me how much I’ve overspent.  The graph shows up the same (full and red) whether I’ve overspent by $1 or by 5 times the amount I budgeted for (see the image above).

I also don’t quite understand why each category needs to have an Income column.  I don’t think it’s very likely that I will have many incoming transactions for the Groceries category.

To iBank’s credit, they’re not using the envelope method of budgeting and so it’s not designed to enforce those kinds of rules.  It’s not so much the design that I fault, but rather it’s the lack of true budgeting power that you find with more effective budgeting systems/methodologies.

A Few Other iBank Features

There are a few other features that I’d like to highlight, but won’t go into too much detail on.

Forecast – There’s a Forcast feature that allows you to forecast your future financials based on scheduled transactions, average of previous balances, or both.

Being that I didn’t have much data in the system I wasn’t able to fully test the feature, but I suspect that it will work just fine for those looking for such a thing.

Smart Import Rules - As you might expect, this allows you to set rules as to how your imported bank data appears in the transaction registry.  This is a great and very worthwhile feature.

Scheduled Transactions – iBank does allow you to schedule regular transactions without much difficulty.

Get Quotes - I was unable to test it, but it appears that you can get up to date quotes on holdings in your investment portfolio.

Tax Handling – iBank does allow you to input certain data pertaining to taxes for each transaction.  You can then export this info come tax time to help with your tax accounting.

iPhone Sync – If you have a MobileMe account, you can view and edit your transactions on your iPhone.

iBank’s Dashboard Widget

And of course, any Mac application wouldn’t be complete without it’s own dashboard widget right?

I downloaded the iBank widget from apple.com to try it out.  Here’s what it looks like:

Essentially all that the widget does is allow you to enter a transaction without having the iBank application up and running. It also gives you a balance and plays a fun little “Cha Ching” noise as you enter the transaction.

I can certainly see how one would appreciate such a widget if they were using iBank on a regular basis.  It worked just fine for me – when I logged back into iBank, there were my two new transactions in the register.

iBank’s Price

To purchase iBank, it will cost you $59.99.  If you find that you like the iBank system, that’s a very decent price.  What really matters is that it helps you to better manage your money.  If so, it will pay for itself many times over.

I do think, however, that there are more effective solutions in the market for $60 (or even cheaper) that will have a greater impact on your budgeting.

Free Trial – As mentioned, they offer a 30-day free trial.  So you might as well give it a spin to see if it’s something that you’ll like.

iBank Overall Conclusion

IGG Software has done a good job in the development of iBank 3.  I found almost no bugs and it did everything that I expected it to do.  It’s very Mac friendly and is much better than it’s competitor, Cha-Ching.  It has a very clean interface and you can tell the developers have thought quite a bit about the actual usability of the app.

Will iBank revolutionize your finances? If you’re not currently tracking your spending, than it will certainly help.

There are, however, other personal finance software applications out there that will do a better job of helping you to create solid spending plans and help you stick with a more comprehensive budget.  Taking a more proactive approach with your budget will do wonders for your financial situation.

Try iBank 3

At first glance Cha Ching (Cha-Ching) looks like it trys to simplify your finances and will likely provide basic functionality in terms of managing your money.  How does it stand up to the competition?  Let’s dive in and find out!

Update: Cha-Ching was acquired by Intuit (the same company who acquired Mint.com) in August, 2011 and as such is no longer being updated or supported. I’m told it still works if you have, or can find, a copy, but my recommendation would be to look elsewhere. There are plenty of other great Mac alternatives. As for the creators of Cha-Ching, it sounds like they’re now (or at least were) working at Intuit. See TechChruch’s page for the details about the Cha-Ching acquisition.

My Experience with Cha Ching

During this review I’ll be going over the Cha Ching 2 Beta version.  I’ll essentially walk you through my experience with Cha Ching, looking at ease of use, solid design, good functionality, and features. But what I really judge the application by is how effective it is at helping me manage my finances better (does it encourage good money management practices?).

Installing Cha Ching

Installing Cha Ching 2 was a snap.  After clicking the download link on the Midnight Apps homepage, I saved the zip file to my desktop.  A quick unzip, double click on the cute little piggy bank, and I was on my way to budgeting bliss (well that has yet to be seen, but at least I was in the application).  I was presented with the main screen of the Cha-Ching app.  So far so good.

(Click images to enlarge) The look of the Cha Ching application should be very familiar for Mac users.  It follows the same design principles as many other Mac apps, particularly that of iTunes.  I like it.

First Impressions

One feature that wasn’t present but that would have been nice is to have tool tips set up so that when you hover over items, it gives a description of what it is.  There were a number of buttons that I simply didn’t know what they did at first.  After clicking around you get the hang of it, but should I have to go through the extra time?

While I can usually make my way around applications such as this one without too much difficulty, there will certainly be some people using the software that may be in need of a little guidance.  It would be nice to have a brief walkthrough or at least some general guidance as to what to do to get started on adding accounts, importing transactions, getting started on your budget, etc.

*Update: Part way through the review I shut down Cha-Ching and restarted it.  At that time a screen popped up that asked if I wanted to 1. Start using Cha-Ching, 2. Start with Example Database, or 3. Visit Community.

I was glad to see the option of testing it out with an example already set up, only to find that it isn’t clickable.  So aparently they are working on it, but it isn’t implemented yet.  This will be a nice feature once it’s ready.

No User Manual?

After I had starting playing around with app for a bit I began to want some kind of guide to give some basic steps to get started.  Admittedly, I’m probably just a little impatient and want to get rocking quicker.  While I wish they would have given me something at the startup of the app, I thought that for sure I could at least find some kind of guide or user manual online from Midnight Apps or elsewhere. To my surprise, I wasn’t able to find anything.  I did, however, find a number of people that were looking for the same thing as evidenced by their posts on the Midnight Apps community.

I don’t know if they’re working on such a thing, but I sure hope so. So as far as ease of use goes, so far that category is lacking.  Now, it’s possible that once you get the hang of it, it’s a snap.  But if I have to get the hang of it, is it really that easy to use?

Adding Accounts to Cha Ching

You add accounts to Cha Ching by clicking the “New Account” button at the top left of the app (you can also add one by clicking the “+” symbol at the bottom left). I put in the required info to add my account (checking) and clicked Continue.  At first I thought that nothing happened (other than having an Accounts item show up) because I didn’t see my checking account anywhere.  It turns out that you have click the little arrow next to Accounts to drop down your account list (silly me).

A Small Bug

I found what I can only assume was a small bug when my initial balance for my accounts didn’t show up after I added them.  When I added a transaction or two, it only took the account into the negative (obviously). I quit the app and restarted it, hoping it would help.  When it started again, my accounts were no longer there.  I added my account a second time and again, it didn’t show up.

I quit and restarted again and tadaa! Magically my account showed up with a starting balance. Needless to say this experience only 5 minutes into the process certainly doesn’t instill much confidence.

Different Views in Cha Ching

Cha Ching allows you to view your transactions in 4 different ways.

The first, and default view is a hybrid between the List view and the Coverflow view.  Here you can the image of the transaction, the payee, tags, date, amount, and whether or not it has been reconciled (has hit your bank account yet).

The second view is a list view (this makes the most sense to me).

The third is a Coverflow view (much like the iTunes Coverflow).  This makes no sense to me, but more on that later.

The last view is a window that connects to your banks website to view the transactions (more on this next).

Adding Transactions to Cha Ching

First of all, Cha Ching has an interesting feature (not sure what it’s called, but I’ll call it…Quick Look) that allows you to visit your banks website within the application to make inputting transaction a bit easier.  You can access it by clicking compass looking icon at the top right.

Whether or not this makes it faster or not, I’m not sure but it’s there for those who may like it.

Adding transactions individually is a fairly simple process.  You just click on the “New” button in the lower left section of the app.  A window on the right appears that allows you to input the transaction details.  Here you can also add tags and notes to the transaction (this will help when searching for transactions later).

While it certainly wasn’t difficult to add transactions, it wasn’t exactly fast either.  If I choose to manually enter 20 transactions rather than import them, I would doing a ton of clicking around to do so.  I was wanting to be able use my keyboard to start a new transaction often and would have loved to have been able to tab through all the information and type it in.  (They do allow some tabbing but it skips over some input sections (i.e. the categories) so you still have use the mouse a great deal).

This may not be a deal breaker for some, but for others it may get a little frustrating (it certainly was for me).

Importing Bank Transactions

Cha Ching supports three kinds of import files, OFX, QFX, and QIF to import your bank transactions.  Most banks should support these file formats.

You import transactions by clicking on File, then the import option of your choice.  After selecting the file to import (you obviously have to download that from your bank) you are presented with a screen that allows to choose which account it is for and select which transactions you would like to import.

As with almost any personal finance software in which you import the data from your bank, you will often have to change the payee to something more understandable (like “Chevron” rather than “1200 S 400 E…”).

While importing your transactions will definitely save you a good deal of time, it still doesn’t solve the fact that much of the data that you’ll want to enter will have to entered using the Edit panel (which requires more time to click around).

In the transaction window you can edit the Payee, Tags, and Notes.  That’s it.  If you want to (and you will need to) input the amount, category, type of transaction, or date, you have to use the Edit panel.  If you ask me, it’s rather tedious, but that’s just my opinion.

Can’t Add Custom Categories

One thing that I found unfortunate was that you can’t add your own custom categories.

While Cha Ching offers a pretty good list to get you going, everyone is different and will have different categories that they like to use (for example, I like to have a Fast Food category and a Restaurant category to keep the two seperate in my budget).  I see this as a major flaw.

I also didn’t like how the categories were listed in the menu.  They were alphabetical order.  This is fine in theory, but would be much more effective if they were grouped in spending areas.  For example, Food would have Groceries, Fast Food, and Restaurant, under it.

Also, because I was fairly unfamiliar with the terms they use for the categories it took me quite a while to find the ones I was looking for (they use Dining, I was looking for Restaurant).  Click image to see full list of categories.

*Update:  As I went on to the budgeting section, I realized that they use Tags, rather than Categories to run their budget.  This somewhat alleviates the need to have custom categories because you create whatever tags you want.  I thought it was a little weird to create your budget from Tags and not Categories, but to each his own I guess.

Other than for filtering and search purposes, I’m not entirely sure why you need both Tags and Categories, but maybe I’m missing something.

Splitting Transactions

Cha Ching allows you to split your transactions so your budget can be more accurate.  This is an essential feature in any personal finance application and I was glad to see that Cha Ching had it.

After clicking on a transaction to select it, click Split in the bottom left of the screen. You are taken to the Split panel.  After clicking Enable (a small annoyance) you then click the “+” sign (another small annoyance) and enter in the Title, Amount, and Tag of a portion of the transaction.  Click the + again and do same until you’ve fully split your transaction.

Coverflow and Adding Images to Transactions

If you choose to, you can add images to your transactions.  This would primarily be used if you wanted to look at your transactions in Coverflow view. The process is fairly easy.

First you have to have a picture (I took mine from the internet).  Double click a transaction.  Then click on the the icon that looks like a picture frame in the Edit panel on the right.  You then simply drag and drop the photo into the box.  It was easy and worked flawlessly.

It then also adds that photo in a library of sorts to be used for future transactions. You can then switch to Coverflow view and watch your transaction images fly across the screen beautifully.

My issue with this isn’t that it doesn’t work.  The only question that I have is, “How does this help me better manage my money?”  Sure, it’s fun and a great time waster.  But it does nothing to help me budget my finances more effectively.

Time would have been much better spent finding ways to simplify the transaction editing process or improving the budgeting section rather than creating such a fancy feature that doesn’t actually help anyone.

Quick Search in Cha Ching 2

One feature that I really like in Cha Ching (that’s native to many Mac applications) is the quick search in the top right corner.

Once you begin typing in the search box it automatically begins filtering the transactions to only show results that match what you’re typing.  You can search for tags, payees, amounts, and maybe a few other things.  I didn’t, however, allow me to search for a specific date.

This is nice, for example, if I want to see all my spending for the tag Food.  Just type in Food and it shows you all your transactions that match that tag.  I found this search feature to be fast, effective, and quite nice.

Filtering in Cha Ching 2

Cha Ching also has a filtering feature that allows you filter all your transactions by any number of criteria that you choose.

By clicking the Filter icon at the top right you are presented with a screen section that allows you to set your criteria.  For an example, I set the first identifier to “Tag”, the second to “Contains”, and then typed in “Groceries” in the last one.  After clicking Save As I can name this filter and then it’s saved on my left panel under “Collections”.

You can think of this as a type of saved spending report.  For example, next month when I want to see all the transactions that were tagged Groceries, I can just click on my “Collection” that I just created.

You can create as many filters (or collections) as you wish, each with as many criteria as you think is appropriate.

Cha Ching on the iPhone

For all of you who have an iPhone, you may want to try the Cha-Ching iPhone app.

Unfortunately, this review doesn’t cover it’s functionality because I don’t own an iPhone.  Midnight Apps does have a good number of screen shots and even a demo video that you may want to check out.

You can purchase the iPhone app for $2.99 at the Apple app store.

Cha Ching’s Budget

You can have multiple budget’s in Cha Ching, which is nice.

To add a budget, click the + sign at the lower left.  Then click on the Budget icon, enter in a name for your budget, and click continue. You’re brought to the budget screen where you have your “budgeted” income on the left and your budget for your expenses on the right.

Cha Ching uses Tags, rather than Categories to keep track of your spending.  Enter a tag (it autofills as you type – nice functionality). Enter a limit.  And enter the frequency.    You can see the quick sample budget that I set up in the images below.

After you click done, you are taken to the Budget Overview screen.  Here you can see how you’re doing with your budget for the month (or whatever time frame you set it to in the lower left of the screen). It basically just shows you a bar graph that fills up as you spend.

This is where I was fairly let down with Cha Ching.  I’ve seen this same budgeting approach with Mint, moneyStrands, and many others.  Essentially all you’re doing is setting a “limit.” If you go over, all it does is show you a full bar.  Not even a slap on the wrist.

I guess this is a little better than simply writing down your spending limit somewhere, but it’s not near as effective as other budgeting methodologies (especially the envelope method).  Cha Ching doesn’t do much to encourage a forward looking approach with your finances.  When budgeting with Cha Ching I feel more like I’m drawing a line in the sand, rather than creating a detailed plan for my spending and savings accumulation.

Cha Ching Price

They offer a 30 day free trial, after which you pay $40 if you want to keep using the software.  I like that they have the trial (mostly because I believe most people would be dissapointed if they paid the $40 upfront).

While $40 is a very good price for a finance software application, Cha-Ching (in it’s current version) still has some work to do before I would recommend it at that price.

Cha Ching Conclusion

Cha Ching is a pretty Mac friendly application.  It looks clean and friendly and will be very familiar to those Mac users out there.  They’ve integrated a few of the features (quick search) that many Mac users would instinctively look for in an application such as this. That’s nice.

I found the transaction entering process a bit more tedious than other solutions that I’ve worked with, which makes it not quite as “quick” and “easy” as I had hoped.  Throughout my experience with Cha Ching I found more bugs than I’d like to admit (one that caused me to have to force quit the app).  It is, however, in beta still so you must expect at least some troubles here and there – I’m just saying that they don’t have it right quite yet.

The main concern I have for Cha Ching is the weak budgeting section.  While it’s true that the act of simply monitoring your spending will have a positive effect on one’s spending habits, I feel that there are much more effective approaches at budgeting and creating spending plans (I’m a fan of the envelope budgeting method). The simple bar graph just doesn’t do it for me.

What is personal finance software supposed to do?  If the answer is to simply track your transactions and monitor your spending, then Cha Ching has done a fine job.  It will do it.  If the answer, however, is to make it as easy and quick as possible to manage your money, to create effective budgets, and to actively plan for your future expenses and savings accumulation, then Cha Ching may have fallen short.

There is certainly a few good features in Cha Ching, but the package as a whole is simply not up to par with the better financial management applications on the market today.

*Note: This review of moneyStrands was performed in May, 2009. There have been many updates (and improvements, I’m sure) to the moneyStrands system since that time. I’ll be updating this review to reflect the most current features as soon as possible.

A Brief History of moneyStrands

moneyStrands (I didn’t forget to capitalize the ‘M’ – that’s how their branded name is written) is part of the larger, parent company Strands, Inc.  Strands began their venture capitalizing on their social recommendation technologies and now has three different offerings.  These offerings include moneyStrands (personal finance software), Strands.com (a social media lifestreaming source), and Strands Social Recommender (a sort of business solution).

Through a couple of acquisitions, Strands launched moneyStrands in April, 2008.

A Walkthrough of My Experience with moneyStrands

moneyStrands has a clean website that quickly gives the impression that they are focusing on the late-teen, and 20 year old crowd.  It has a hip feel to it which many will relate to.  The cartoon spokeswomen, Monica, suggested that I download a poster showing how moneyStrands helps her with her finances.  That I did and found a nice little pdf with “5 Quick Steps to Your Smarter Self.”

It maps out 5 steps to using moneyStrands.  These steps are:

1. Sign up for free
2. Add accounts
3. Beef up your profile
4. Make it yours
5. Stay in charge on-the-move

One feature of moneyStrands (and the way that they make money) is by recommending certain things to you as it learns about you through your spending, profile, etc.  This pdf also lists the 4 types of recommendations that moneyStrands will give you as you use it:

From this we can see that they are taking much of the same approach as Mint, with the possibility of a little more of a social aspect.

Setting up moneyStrands

After clicking the sign up button, I came to a simple form asking for basic information to set up my account.  A few quick keystrokes and I was in business.

My next screen was a welcome box that gave me the option of either seeing a live demo or adding my accounts.  I chose to see a live demo.  I found this to be a nice feature, allowing me to get a good feel right off the bat of how moneyStrands would perform and how to find my way around the application. Nice job moneyStrands.

After exiting the demo, you’re automatically taken to add your accounts.  Obviously, just like with Mint, they use your online banking username and password to gain access to all your bank information.  As with Mint, I have no reason to believe that moneyStrand hasn’t taken every necessary precaution so as to ensure that your information is secure.  There are, however, some that will feel uneasy about giving someone such access.  If that idea bothers you then moneyStrands may not be for you.

Made nervous by this screen, I timed  it to see how long it actually took to download the bank info.  I didn’t really want to wait a few minutes, but the time was actually a fairly short 60 seconds or so. A pleasant surprise.

While maybe not quite as clean as Mint, moneyStrands still provides a fairly intuitive and easily understandable interface. Along the top of the screen are six tabs: Overview, Details, Analysis, Accounts, Community, and Just For Me.  To give a general idea of what moneyStrands has to offer, I’ll go through each one and highlight what sticks out to me.

moneyStrand’s Overview

This overview tab shows, as expected, an overview of your financial situation.  Here you can see information about your accounts, budget, alerts, debt to income ratio, “Just For Me,” and reports.

According to moneyStrands, I have a “good” debt to income ratio.  Curious as to how they arrived at this conclusion, I clicked on ‘See Details.’   It showed that I had, among other things, a ‘credit card minimum’ of $200.  Being that I hadn’t downloaded in any information about my credit cards, I was confused as to how they came up with this info.  At first I thought they were automatically categorizing my transactions and doing it incorrectly, but after clicking around for a bit, I realized that I was the one who needed to input the information.  Silly me.

After plugging in my own numbers, the nifty debt to income ratio arrow snapped into place (still hovering over ‘good’ ).  The categories of the income and debt are meant to be sortable, but when trying to sort them from greatest to least, it only moved them around in an order that I couldn’t quite figure out.  moneyStrands may have a little bug in this area.

*Update: A senior member of moneyStrands contacted me and said that this small bug is now fixed.  It’s nice to know that they are on top of things and are constantly improving the software.  That’s a good sign.

The overview section looks to be fairly customizable.  It appears that they refer to each section of information as a widget.  They are all able to be moved around, minimized, or closed out altogether.  It reminds me a bit of a personalized iGoogle page. Nice.

In the top right of the screen, you are given a set of icons that feed you the recommendations.  You can also get support, give feedback, change your settings, and logout there.

moneyStrand’s Details Tab

The details tab of moneyStrands leads you to the lists of transactions for your account.  There is a ’sidebar’ on the left listing your financial instituitions and your different accounts.  If you click on a certain bank’s tab, a list of the individual accounts will be fanned out. This allows you to see either all of your transactions at one time or only see the transactions for a certain account.

Anxious to see how easy it was to play with and alter my transaction info, I got right to it.  moneyStrands did a pretty good job of auto-categorizing the transactions. Purchases such as those at restaurants, office supply stores, and the movies were correctly categorized.  But there was still a good number that either weren’t categorized or were done so poorly.

I found the process of changing or adding a category to each transaction to be rather cumbersome.  Not because the process was difficult (all you do is click on the category column and pick one from the drop down menu), but rather because there is a bit of a delay between clicks and items showing up to be selected.  For a couple of transactions, it was ok, but I couldn’t imagine having to do it on a regular basis.    The saving grace for this application will be if it remembers (or allows me to save) the categories that come from a certain purchase location.  Otherwise, this step will be far too frustrating for me.

*Update: I just found that you are able to have certain transactions always be noted as a certain category.  Select the transaction and click ‘Categorize’ above.  Then select the category and click ‘Always Use.’  Thank you moneyStrands!

You are also able to rename a transaction and have it always use that new alias to identify that transaction.

Is moneyStrand’s Details section much better that Mints? Not really. In fact, when I pulled up Mint next to moneyStrands, I found that Mint was quite a bit faster at changing categories, altering transactions etc.  This slower spead may not be a deal breaker for everyone, but it definitely was a bit of a turnoff for me.

Inability to Create Your Own Categories

I like to personalize my budget and financial tracking to the way I spend money.  As such, I like to have my own personal categories to track my spending.  So when moneyStrands didn’t allow me to create my own categories, it was a deal breaker.  Granted, they give you a fairly decent amount of categories to choose from, but everyone is different and would benefit greatly from having the flexibility to cater their personal budget to them. This may be something that they will institute in the future.

moneyStrand’s Analysis Tab

moneyStrand’s Analysis tab is simply two graphs that are designed to help you ‘analyze’ your finances.  There is, of course, the ever-present pie graph showing you where your money has gone over the past month or longer depending on the time frame you choose.  You are able (thankfully) to see the transactions that pertain to each section by clicking on ‘Transaction Details’ to the right.

The second graph, I didn’t find particlularly useful. It’s a ‘Balance of Flows’ that is meant to show you the inflow or outflow of your money (and yes, we had some large expenses come out of this particular bank account this month).  I guess the graph shows a decent picture of how you did on your budget that month, but aside from that I didn’t get much out of it.

That’s about all that the Analysis tab has to offer.  I hate to keep comparing it to Mint, but this section again fell short of Mint’s “Trends” area simply because it’s not quite as easy or as quick to get to the data that I want to.

moneyStrand’s Accounts Tab

As mentioned earlier, this gives a very basic, but clear overview of all of your accounts that you’ve set up in moneyStrands. By clicking on ‘See Details’ you are simply taken to the Details tab.  This is also where you can add more accounts when the need arises.

moneyStrands’ Community Tab

This is clearly where Strands’ expertise is suppose to shine through and what is suppose to make moneyStrands different from the rest. Interestingly enough, I noticed not too long ago that Mint has added a section to their Trends tab called SpendSpace that compares your spending to others just like moneyStrands is doing here.  Which is better? Let’s take a look.

The top one is moneyStrands’ community section and the bottom is Mint’s SpendSpace.  You can click the picture to enlarge it.

After playing with it for a bit, it became clear that moneyStrands offers a great deal more in terms of customization and displaying multiple categories at once. In addition, you are able to quickly drill down into the a certain category by clicking on the bars, allowing you to see more detailed comparisons.  It also shows data regarding income, not just your expenses compared to others.

In addition, with moneyStrands you are also able to hone in on who exactly you want to be compared to.  Mint allows you to select a state or city, but moneyStrands allows you to select any number of demographics including age, gender, financial knowledge, etc. Unfortunately, the same small time lag is  still apparent while navigating around this tab as well.

How Concerned Are You About Others’ Spending?

When it comes to comparing your spending habits to others in the ‘community,’ moneyStrands definitely wins over Mint.  But my question is: Really, how concerned are you about seeing what others are spending? Sure it’s nifty and kind of fun – for about 5 mintues.  But past that how does it help me to better manage my finances?  I guess if I’m spending way more than others in my restaurants category, then it might be a bit of a wake up call, but don’t you think that I already know that I’m eating at Red Lobster way too often?

However, there are many that this social aspect will appeal to quite a bit.  For them, I say moneyStrands should provide you with plenty of fun info.

moneyStrands’ Just For Me Tab

As you can see, this is the are where moneyStrands gets to make their money. Here they have different recommendations for you based upon your spending habits, personal profile, etc.  So far I received one recommendation to buy an American Express credit card, one to buy an Amazon Kindle, and two financial tips (about term life insurance and retirement planning).

I like that this section isn’t intrusive and is found in it’s own tab. From what I can tell, if I want to ignore the sales pitches, I can.

The Budget Widget

Now that I’ve gone through each tab found at the top of moneyStrands, I’m dying to see what their ‘My Budget’ widget has to offer.  From what I’ve seen so far, moneyStrands appears to have the same weakness as Mint in that it is very hands off and that it acts more as a rear view picture of where your money has gone rather than a tool to help you plan for where your money should go.

Unfortunately, I found the budget functionality of moneyStrands to be as close to unhelpful as possible. It follows the same exact method that Mint uses in it’s “budget” section.  The only difference being that moneyStrands is much slower and more painful to actually set up.  In reality, there is very little actual budgeting that even occurs.

The reason that I’m such a fan of YNAB, Mvelopes, and other envelope budgeting systems is because they actually help you to actively create and follow a full blown budget.  You take an active role in allocating every dollar to a certain category and plan for it’s future expense.  The result is a much more effective budget that actually makes a difference in your spending habits.  Both moneyStrands and Mint fall far short of this ideal.

A Small Bug

For some reason, when I was automatically logged off and then logged back into moneyStrands, I noticed that my Debt to Income Ratio indicator (in the overview) had fallen from Good to Severe.  It turns out that the figures that I had put into that widget were erased, showing that I had no income.  Nothing major, but something that I would hope wouldn’t occur frequently.

Update: A senior member of moneyStrands contacted me and said that this small bug is now fixed.  It’s nice to know that they are on top of things and are constantly improving the software.  That’s a good sign.

moneyStrands Mobile

moneyStrands also has to option of accessing your financial information via a mobile device such as an iPhone.  All you have to do is go to www.moneystrands.com in your mobile browser.

Being that I don’t currently have a phone with that function, the review of it’s mobile technology will have to be saved for another day.  If anyone wants to donate an iPhone, I would certainly consider the offer.

moneyStrands’ Pros

The price is right – moneyStrands is free.  The social aspect of moneyStrands is certainly its main strength and may be appealing to some.  The interface is fairly customizable, allowing you to set it up to see only the information that you want to.  moneyStrands, like Mint, does a great job of trying to do everything for you.  It does a fairly good job of auto-categorization of your transactions and gives you a great snapshot of your financial situation at any given time.

moneyStrands’ Cons

The main setback for moneyStrands is in the weakness of its budgeting capabilities.  It promotes a very hands off approach which doesn’t correlate into an effective money management tool.  It’s great at giving you a snapshot of your finances or an overview of your past spending, but does little to help you to create a planned budget and stick with it.

I’ve often suggested Mint as something that is a great addition to other budgeting software.  The same would go for moneyStrands, however in my opinion, moneyStrands falls short of Mint (aside from the social aspect).  The main reason why I would use Mint rather than moneyStrands is simply because Mint is a bit faster than moneyStrands.  Each task in moneyStrands from dealing with transactions, to inputting data, to simply scrolling on the page seemed to be take an extra fraction of a second.  And after a while, those seconds add up.  By the end, I was a bit frustrated with it.

moneyStrands’ Overall Conclusion

moneyStrands is good at two things: aggregating your financials and allowing you to compare your spending with other, targeted groups.  It does little, however, to help you effectively manage your money.  I prefer a more hands on approach with my finances than moneyStrands currently allows me to do.

In addition, it seems a bit more sluggish than other options in the market (namely Mint).  It’s free, so you’re not out any money and it may be a great tool to be used congruently with other budgeting software.

Note: This is a review of GnuCash version 2.2.9. The current version (2.4.7) is sure to have some improvements.

Beginner’s Guide: The folks over at Packt Publishing have created a beginner’s guide to Gnucash. I’ll try to do a full review of the book later, but I wanted to at least let everyone know that it was available. You can find the Gnucash Beginner’s Guide here. At first glance it looks to be mostly focused on small business, but I’m not entirely sure yet.

Here We Go:

My first scare came with this line about installation:

To install GnuCash on other platforms, users will need Gnome 2, guile, and slib. Neither the currently used swig nor the previously used g-wrap packages are needed anymore when compiling from tarball or when installing a binary.

Sorry…come again? I have no idea what a Gnome 2, guile, slib, swig, g-wrap package, or tarball is. And that was just in two sentences about the installation. Conclusion: Open Source software documentation is not for the layman (a group to which I proudly belong).

However, I, luckily, run Windows. And there’s an installer of GnuCash for that.

Installing GnuCash

The installer file is 50MB+, so be ready to wait a few minutes (even on high speed) to get the thing downloaded. Once downoaded, the installer walks you fairly quickly through the entire process. Why am I talking about installing GnuCash? Because Open Source software is notoriously more difficult to install than commercial software, so it bears mentioning.

Getting Started with GnuCash

I chose to start with the Help Tutorials mainly because I had heard already that GnuCash could be fairly daunting for new users. I’m fairly experienced with accounting from school and work, so I wasn’t too worried about understanding it for myself. But trying to look at it through the eyes of a person who just wants to get their money under control and start seeing results? The tutorials aren’t really tutorials – just help files.

Honestly, I was shocked to find a tutorial on double-entry accounting (welcome back to Accounting 200 everyone! Please take your seat, settle in, and get ready for a B-O-R-I-N-G class). GnuCash makes the claim of being simple to use, but then they’ve decided they need to teach the users double-entry accounting so they can use the software? I understand that under the hood, lots of accounting software uses the double-entry method (Moneydance comes to mind as well, though it has other weaknesses), but to expose it to the user in this way seemed over the top. I think more users are scared away as a result.

I decided to nix the tutorials (in total, we’re talking hundreds and hundreds of pages, so I think I’ll use it more as a reference than as an actual “let’s work through all of this” type of guide).

Diving into GnuCash Head First

I chose File -> New File and was presented with a welcome druid (I say druid only because the software calls it a druid as well, a joke which I understand, but don’t find particularly funny. Perhaps it’s too early in the day).

The account setup process wasn’t too bad, though honestly I think someone with little experience with bookkeeping would have issues getting started (and would need to read the lengthy tutorials).

Importing my Account Activity into GnuCash

GnuCash offers a whole slew of options for importing your bank transactions, most of which I don’t even recognize. They obviously offer the standard importation of QIF, OFX, and QFX. I downloaded my credit card activity for the past two weeks and gave it a whirl.

The first thing I noticed was that it wasn’t a traditional dialog box. This is probably only noticeable to someone like me, who’s used to the Windows or Mac OS, and not Linux. I had chosen specifically to import OFX/QFX so I was surprised to see that the dialog still showed me all available file formats. Normally in Windows a dialog shows only files that can actually be opened by the program. It’s a small detail I know, but the compilation of small things is what makes great software.

You can walk through the gallery of screenshots below for the importation process with GnuCash. The short of it is that it asked me which account was associated with my imported file (it was my Credit Card account). It then showed me the scariest yellow screen I’ve ever seen, with cryptic headers at the top “A” and “R” referencing things like “source split shown” and “New, UNBALANCED (need acct to transfer $X.XX!”. I had no idea what was going on, so I read a little bit in the tutorials.

Okay, scratch that. I couldn’t find anything on importing files in the tutorials.

So I checked the help files (different from the tutorials — it’s a whole other section apart from the hundreds of tutorial pages. No dice. I found something that looked promising as far as explaining the yellow import dialog, but alas, it was “under construction”

I decided just to go for it and I imported my transactions. On opening my Credit Card register, I could see a warning sign: all of the transactions had been marked as “Imbalance-USD”. So, it was fairly obvious that I needed to balance things. How? My business experience tells me they need to be categorized as expenses.

The categorization process isn’t too bad. You can type and it will begin finding the category you’re looking for. I don’t like, however, that all of the expenses are in one single category (or account as GnuCash calls it) of Expenses. So I can’t have Food:Dining and Food:Groceries, I’m forced to have Expenses:Dining and Expenses:Groceries. I can already foresee this being an annoyance if I ever want to run a higher-level spending report such as all money spent on Food, Housing, Utilitities, Entertainment, etc.

Wait. Hold the phones. You can create categories such as Expenses:Food:Dining and Expenses:Food:Groceries. I take back what I said above. Problem solved (though this results in very long names in the Register).

There’s no way to select multiple transactions in the Register, so I couldn’t assign categories any quicker than on a one-to-one basis. This got annoying very quickly. I was so annoyed actually, that I spent quite a while digging through the Help system to find out how to select multiple transactions in GnuCash. No dice.

We’ll get more into GnuCash’s look and feel later on in the review. I was curious about their online banking.

Setting up Online Banking with GnuCash

I gave online banking a go (though it took me a while to find out how — it’s under Tools):

It looks like it’s very possible, though not straightforward. I found this about Wells Fargo on the GnuCash wiki:

You must enable (and pay for) OFX access to your account. Instructions here. If you have a PMA relationship contact your Wells banker, they may waive the OFX access fees.

So I’m disappointed. It looks like GnuCash’s only option is through DirectConnect, which leaves me paying a monthly fee. Quicken was able to handle it through WebConnect with Wells Fargo. Confused yet anyone? DirectConnect means there’s a fee, and WebConnect means there isn’t. The end result is the same…

A Walk Through GnuCash Features

Find Transactions - You can find transactions by going to Edit -> Find or using the standard Ctrl+F shortcut key combination. The dialog box is very functional, but may scare off users that aren’t used to dealing with a very flexible query engine, and that’s basically what this is. You get a lot of functionality, but not a lot of user friendliness. It took me a second to realize how it worked.

You can search in any (or all) of 13 different fields for a transaction, such as description, memo, number, action (?), notes, etc. I found it strange you couldn’t search by amount but could search by share price. It would seem the amount would be much more useful to a larger base of GnuCash users. At any rate, then you just need to specify that your criteria contains, begins with, ends with, etc.

I purposely chose to find a transaction that I knew didn’t exist. The result was that it showed me an empty Register. A message saying “No transactions matching your criteria could be found” or something like that would have been much better.

Scheduled Transactions – The Scheduling dialog is also a bit daunting, but with a few minutes work, it’s not so bad. The only downside I found was that the frequency options were woefully inadequate. They give None, Once, Daily, Weekly, Semi-Monthly, and Monthly. There’s nothing for quarterly, semi-annually, or even annually. I was hoping for something twice-monthly so I could schedule my salary. What I ended up having to do was to create two Monthly transactions scheduled on different days.

I ran into a pretty big roadblock when I tried to schedule the transaction and it told me it couldn’t be created because there was no template transaction. No what? There was another tab in the dialog called “Template Transaction” so I headed over there and found a very confusing interface. I actually had to recall back to my accounting classes to realize that I needed to record two transactions. One, a debit to my checking account for my salary, and another, a credit to my Income:Salary account. These types of details are what kill GnuCash for me. I can see that it has functionality that would suit a small business, but to be touted as a personal finance application? It’s just too darn scary for people. You can check out the galary below of my walk through the Scheduled Transactions feature of GnuCash.

Transfers – This is another one of those places where we take what should be a fairly simple operation and scare the user with a very complex-looking dialog box. In the end, doing Transfers is very easy. It just looks scary.

I set up a transfer to pay my credit card off with some of the balance of my checking account. The end result was that I got both transactions entered into their respective registers and everything worked out just great. If you right-click on a transfer transaction and select “Jump”, you’re taken to the other side of the transfer. Nice functionality there (standard, but still nice).

Reconciliation – The reconiliation feature in GnuCash is straightforward and if you’ve ever used Quicken, MS Money, Moneydance, or any other standard financial application, you’ll recognize the reconciliation window. I created a quick gallery of screenshots from the process:

The only quirk I ran into was when you select to add a “New” transaction from the GnuCash reconciliation dialog, it closes the reconciliation window completely (and doesn’t save what you’ve done, or “postpone” as they call it in GnuCash) and there was a very strange drawing error (see the picture above). It cleared up if I clicked off the register and then clicked back again.

There are other features such as Stock Split, View Lots, Split Transactions, etc. but we won’t cover those — mainly because I think they’re beyond the scope of PFSR.

GnuCash Business Features

GnuCash, in my opinion, is much more comparable to QuickBooks than it is to Quicken. It’s complexity (though I’m one to admit that Quicken is also quite complex) is up there with Quickbooks, where you sometimes need a professional to figure things out. If you work slowly and methodically through each step, and read the documentation extensively, you’ll probably be just fine.

The business features include:

• New Customers
• Finding Customers
• New Invoices
• Finding Invoices
• New Jobs
• Finding Jobs
• and Processing Payments

I could see it being especially useful for someone doing consulting or freelance work.

GnuCash Reporting

The reporting area is truly daunting! You’ll definitely find some reports here useful for your purposes, while all of the rest you’ll likely never touch:

Whew! I had to ask myself why someone would need to know their Income vs. the Day of Week? That seems a bit like overkill to me (okay, it seems a lot like overkill). If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, you should be! This is extensive and scary.

Budgeting in GnuCash

Budgeting in GnuCash is, as with everything else, a bit difficult. GnuCash has adopted the same approach as most financial packages. Set some arbitary guidelines and then see how you did. At least that’s how it feels.

I have to confess, I didn’t know how to create a budget until I actually did a search in the help file for ‘budget’ and found the entry for ‘Creating a Budget’. The trick: File -> New -> New Budget.

I was then presented wit this less-than-helpful screen:

I didn’t have any idea what to do — even after clicking around for a while — so I jumped back to the help file (again). A ha! You click on the Options button. I set one up to begin August 1st. The Budget isn’t zero-based, in that there’s no overall income with which you work to actually set up a budget where every dollar is assigned to a category.

I tabbed to set it for the next month and it erased what I’d put in August for Expenses:Auto:Gas. You have to hit Enter to make it take (annoying).

Using the GnuCash Estimator – I used the estimate feature on the groceries category, knowing that I’d spent about $150 in August according to what I had already input. It just blanked out what I had already input and made all of the months $0.00. Not so helpful. At all.

I ran a budget report (Reports -> Income & Expenses -> Budget Report) and was a bit dumbfounded as to what I was actually supposed to learn from it. For instance, it showed I had budgeted $0.00 (the bad estimator) for Groceries in August, and then spent $151.14. Yet there wasn’t anything to show me if there was a problem. No red numbers, no negatives, nothing. Basicaly this Budgeted vs. Actual report is extremely hard on the eyes (see the pic below) and not very useful.

I’d love to see GnuCash offer some sort of envelope budgeting system a la YNAB or Mvelopes. However, the fact that they’re married to the double-entry accounting would probably make overlaying a system like that fairly difficult.

Other GnuCash Features

GnuCash also offers a Price Editor, Security Editor, Financial Calculator, Close Book, and General Ledger. These can all be found under the Tools file menu. (I have no idea how the Price Editor works as compared to the Security Editor. It confused me from the get-go. If someone can fill me in, please do so). If you want to see double-entry accounting at its finest, check out the General Ledger here.

GnuCash Conclusion

GnuCash is free, so that’s nice. However, the amount of documentation you’re going to need to pour through in order to understand how to use the program (even on a fairly basic level) isn’t worth the price. GnuCash is functionally powerful, but it’s very weak when it comes to user-friendliness. I’m reminded of the geek saying: “Linux is very user friendly. It’s just picky who its friends are.” I would recommend a personal finance software application that is more user friendly and is more focused on aspects of personal finance that will lead you to success.