Personal Finance Software Reviews

Brought to us by IGG Software, iBank is a shiny personal finance application built for the Mac that claims to be “the Quicken Killer.” While I’m not sure if iBank poses the certain death of Quicken just yet, the idea is intriguing.

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

Cha Ching 2 (by Midnight Apps) is a personal financial application for all of those Mac OS users out there (myself included).  According to the marketing, it’s designed to be easy to use, good looking, and to work seamlessly as you would expect a Mac app to do.

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.

moneyStrands is a fairly new online financial tool marketed mostly to a younger crowd that may be more interested in the social aspect of financial management.  At it’s root, it’s a financial aggregator with a social twist.  It allows you to compare your spending habits with others in definable groups within their community.

*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.