I'm a software engineer, a lifelong Mac user, and I have an interest in good UI and information design. I used to use Quicken in the 90s but I felt like it was taking a lot of my time without giving me much benefit so I stopped. Now that I have a family the money is being spent like there's no tomorrow, so I have been desperate to track my expenses and get them under control. For the last three years, once a year I try to find a good piece of financial software for the Mac that will meet my needs. Of course I refuse to go back to Quicken, too many traumatic memories and too many bad reviews of Quicken for OS X. I want something elegant. I've checked out iBank, and MoneyDance, and Liquid Ledger. None of them gave me warm fuzzies or worked particularly well. I tried writing my own Perl scripts to create textual reports and that got old pretty fast. Last night I performed my annual survey of the OS X financial software scene and came across Cha-Ching (eye candy), and then Moneywell. Holy cow. A choir of angels started singing. This could finally be The One!
I've been feverishly learning and testing Moneywell for the past 24 hours and I'm happy to report that I'm sold. At fist I downloaded version 1.3 and I really cannot put a piece of financial software through its paces with only 200 transactions. That's about 2 months of data for me, and I need about 6 months to have the critical mass of data to truly evaluate how it works in a real world scenario. Fortunately I discovered the 1.4 beta which is not limited. Moneywell exudes elegance, power, and simplicity. It's a joy to use and is clearly designed with genius, passion, and extreme attention to detail. The polish and the first class documentation blow my mind too. I mean just look at the quality of those video tutorials! Kevin you are the master. Importing the data from my 6 or 7 accounts and getting it all categorized into buckets was a snap. It just all works and makse sense. But the thing I am most excited about is the brilliant envelope-based allocation system. Behind all great design is a deep understanding of the underlying problem, and reading your articles and documentation on the envelope/bucket approach to managing spending made it clear you really get it. Knowing the structure of the problem lets you design such an elegant solution. The philosophy behind Moneywell was a revelation to me, and after reading it, it all seems so simple. But I know how much work goes into achieving that simplicity and clarity. Bravo. And thank you for the financial enlightenment -- this is exactly the tool I was looking for to get my spending under control, and now I see I didn't even know what I needed. Here is a list of bugs/features I compiled over the last 24 hours. These apply to 1.4 (200) Beta. I'm running on a 2 year old MBP 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 gigs of RAM. Bugs: - Takes a few seconds of spinning after clicking "check all" in reconcile window, with only 200 transactions in the whole file. Something's afoot there. Takes even longer, maybe up to 10 seconds, after clicking "close" in reconcile window. - When I tried to delete the cash account, Moneywell crashes. Happened several times in a row and then I gave up. I am also experiencing consistent crashes when I try to delete empty buckets that I don't want. Every now and then I can delete one, but most of the time I can't, the program crashes and quits. - Once when I selected 'New Account' from the File menu, nothing happened. It worked when I selected it again. - If I select a month, then select a bucket, the month selection goes away and all months are selected. This doesn't seem right to me. I want to be able to click through each bucket to scan through expenses by category in a given month. If I wanted to go back to selecting all months, I'd do it myself by clicking on the background of the graph. - Neither the left arrow nor the little circles at the top of the graph work to take me back to months in the past, even though there are two months not being displayed. - If I change a bucket name, the entries in the bucket column of the register are not refreshed unless I force a change. (I came across lots of other refresh errors as you noted in one of your posts, but this is the only one I made a note of.) - I had a strange glitch twice where I merged two transactions into a transfer from my checking to my credit card. (I did this by selecting the two transactions and going to "Create Transfer from Selection" in the Transactions menu, as you showed somebody in a screenshot on one of the forum posts.) It worked fine in every way, except that in the monthly graph the amount of the transfer was being added to both the income and the expense bar. My other transfers between the same two accounts did not have that problem, but I used a different process to create those -- just making one of the transactions into a transfer using the transaction detail and deleting the one in the other account. Ultimately I fixed my problem by deleting the bogus transfers and making new ones using the blue transfer icon. - I don't want to assign a bucket for transfers from checking to my credit card, for exactly the reason discussed in your transfers tutorial. However this means that those transfers show up in the unassigned smart bucket. This is annoying because I want to keep that bucket empty. I don't think unassigned transfers should appear in that smart bucket. Feature requests: - Automatic memorized transactions are great, but there are always some unassigned transactions that I need to put in buckets after importing. I'd like a way to do this quickly without having to touch the mouse. (I'm an emacs user after all.) For example, one way of doing this would be to allow editing of the fields within the transaction register. Hitting return would go down to the same field of the next entry. If editing within the register is not in the cards, perhaps there could be a keyboard shortcut to move to the next or previous transaction when the focus is in the transaction detail pane. Right now I have to click back and forth between to select the transaction and then to focus on the bucket field in the transaction detail: two clicks and a bunch of mouse movement for each entry. It's very tedious. - I'd like my memorized transactions to match based on the aliases but not change the payee. A checkbox next to the payee in the memorized transaction form would do the trick. For example, I want to be able to put "EXXON" in the alias field, and have it match on the following and save the bucket, but not change the payee: EXXONMOBIL 34102301 QUINCY MA EXXONMOBIL 34632133 GLOUCESTER MA I don't want to lose the information of where I got the gas. - How about a balance column in the transaction register on the right hand side? My bank registers have that and it would make it a snap to find exactly where a register goes out of balance. Somebody on the forum suggested some sort of mark to show each point where you know it was balanced, but I think a balance column is simpler and more effective. Kevin, thanks so much for an incredible piece of software. It's already so much better than Quicken and you've only just begun. I'll be buying Moneywell now and telling all my Mac friends about it. Yours, Matteo --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "No Thirst Software User Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
