March 27th, 2009

Manage Your Finance With Cha-Ching Mac & iPhone App

Finally, a comprehensive Mac App to manage your finance with style. Cha-Ching 2.0 (currently in beta, free download available until end of April) written by the Midnight Apps, is written from the ground up to take advantage of Leopard’s latest features like CoverFlow. Cha-Ching 2.0 also syncs with the new iPhone app ($2.99) recently available on the App Store. Very powerful combo to manage your finance both at home and on the go.


Cha-Ching 2.0 (beta)

I have tried a few finance management apps and I can say this one looks best. Besides looking good, Cha-Ching packs a whole lot of punches with many useful features:


Lock Your Database


It’s advisable to have Cha-Ching lock up your database with a password to prevent any unauthorized peeks. This is the pretty screen you’ll see once you set a password and re-launch the app.


User Interface

The default view shows your transactions list with a pre-attached image, also showing you very clearly which transaction is reconciled or not. You can even attach scanned receipts for each transaction, transactions with receipts attached will have the attachment batch shown on the transaction item.

All your accounts are shown on the left sidebar after adding accounts and is just a click away to see transactions for each account, be it bank accounts (checking or savings) or credit card accounts.


CoverFlow View

Not sure if this view is really useful when you’re at the “All Transactions” area, the CoverFlow feature works best when you set smart folders with minimal transactions shown at the same time.


Login to bank accounts directly

From the app itself, you can login to your bank account directly without having to login from your web browser. This is helpful when you need to do internet banking and also making a record in Cha-Ching at the same time.


Smart Folders

Think iTunes’s smart playlists or Mail’s smart mailboxes when using this feature. One of the must have features in apps of this genre as it’ll help you heaps when the time calls for doing your taxes.


Budgets

The budgets feature lets you set a pre-define budget for any tags so that you can track your spending easily. Another must have function we take for granted for any finance apps.

I feel that the budgets could be more powerful by showing a history graph of your monthly spendings like how Squirrel app does so that you can also track your spending habits and when you should cut down on spending.


Scheduler | To Do | Payees

Scheduler helps you remember when you should pay your rent or bills, by syncing scheduled items with your iCals. So does To Dos. Set up Payees so that you can easily choose from them when entering transactions.

Option to sync scheduled items, todo or both with iCal via preferences.


Entering Transactions


Enter transaction details via the right sidebar with the option to include an image taken from your harddrive or your iSight camera. The transaction image feature has been improved from version 1 as it lets you choose a history of uploaded images which is very useful if you’re entering repeating transactions.


Upload Scanned Receipts

This feature is the reason why I switched from Squirrel to Cha-Ching!

Keeping your receipts physically doesn’t make alot of sense when the ink on the receipt wears out in the long run.

Also it’s very difficult to tally receipts with your transactions in the future with a sea of transactions, this feature streamlines your receipt with your transaction details seamlessly.

Do note that at this point of time, double clicking on an attachment doesn’t launch the receipt file, this is a known bug and is currently being investigated by the developers. It’s currently a beta app afterall!


Cha-Ching for iPhone


Cha-Ching for iPhone is the best looking app for under the finance genre. I think the app deserves much praise for its attention to details.

The login screen that you see once for every launch, is pretty.

Account view. You can only view transactions from the current month, by clicking on “This Month”. I’m not sure why this is so, maybe it’s an effort to reduce memory footprint?

After clicking “This Month”, you can view all your transactions, reconciled, pending or both. Set a transaction as reconciled or pending easily by clicking on the checkbox.

All your budgets are shown here. For example if you set a transaction’s category as “App Store”, the number will be incremented at the App Store budget. My only wish is that the budgets are linked to tags instead. Cha-Ching supports tags and the new “categories” feature, which I think is kind of redundant when tags is already very powerful. Also one thing to note is that the budgets you set in the Mac app will not sync with the iPhone app.

Schedule transactions appears here.


Syncing with the Mac App

The single most important feature in an iPhone finance app is the ability to sync with it’s Mac’s counterpart. Syncing with the Mac app is flawless. I’ve tested and am able to vouch for that.


Location Awareness

The last most interesting feature for Cha-Ching’s iPhone app is the location awareness feature for Payees by making use of the iPhone’s GPS.

Imagine going to a grocery store to do groceries, after making payment, you record the transaction in Cha-Ching, by using the location awareness function, the app will intelligently know who is the payee by using it’s GPS to figure out your location.

All in all, great apps by the Midnight Apps, only hope the developers are able to clear out the bugs from the 2.0 beta Mac app and release a much stable one soon.





Mac Apps