Ever since launching SUBERNOVA, I was dealing with Paypal almost on a daily basis. What I disliked about Paypal is that it takes some time to login, navigate between sections and view transaction history. It was difficult to filter through transaction history to view only the details you want to.

I realize I am not alone when I discovered GaragePay while googling the internet.

Developed by iwascoding, GaragePay is amongst other popular apps like GarageSale and GarageBuy the company had developed. With GaragePay, you can view, search and archive transactions without having to log into Paypal and more.

Transactions

What GaragePay does is downloading your transaction history from Paypal to let you manipulate the data locally. This tremendously speeds up reviewing your transactions and saves you from dealing with Paypal’s slowness. This saves me a great deal of time when checking balances and transaction history.

Send Money

I was able to send money easily to not one but multiple Paypal users. Sending money is fast, not saying that this is your favorite activity in Paypal, but when you do need to send money, as far as I’m concerned no one can match GaragePay’s speed and ease of use.

Smart Folders

This is the gem and my favorite part of the application.

A life saver!

If you’re familiar with iTunes’ smart playlist and Mail’s smart mailboxes, you already know how to use this.

With smart folders, you can sort your transactions by whatever you like. For me, I sort my transactions by subscribers and transactions in the last couple of days. Taking a glance through how well business is doing is now a breeze. Saves me tons of time.

Refund Money

Again, this is not a fun part of the application. But when you have to, you have to. I am glad that I do not have angry customers yet.

Refunding money is easy and quick, just click on the transaction you want to refund and hit the refund icon at the top.

Export CSV

Depending on the kind of user you are, some like to archive transactions, export to a spreadsheet for keeps. This feature is there to help. Even comes with lots of options to customize your csv export. One of the best parts is being able to manage everything locally.

Conclusion

I find that after using GaragePay to manage and view my transactions, it really saves me from wasting time logging and helps me filter my transaction history better so that it makes more sense.

If you’re selling a product or just a heavy Paypal user, GaragePay is worth checking out.

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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.

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As a sucker for productivity tools, I am always looking around, reading reviews and trying out new native and web applications to manage my day to day life – personal or work wise. You might already be using some that you love or deem useful, but I would like to share 4 tools I use everyday for my personal life and work.

Please pardon me if some of these applications doesn’t work on PC. Here goes:

1) MobileMe, by Apple

MobileMe is Mac & PC friendly! If you have several computers at home, eg. 1 desktop computer, 1 laptop to work on the go, 1 iPhone or iPod Touch, you definitely need your data to be synced across all devices, and nothing does it best like MobileMe. MobileMe not only syncs but pushes data from your calendar, contacts, emails, bookmarks and more to all your devices.

If you like push technology and if you’re running a small business run by 2 person for example, it’s not practical to pay a hefty price monthly for Microsoft Exchange or Blackberry in my opinion. MobileMe only costs US$99/year for Single User and US$149/year for Family Pack to enable you to have push email, calendar and contacts to your iPhone and your other machines.

You will also get a full suite of web applications allowing you to manage your emails, calendars, contacts, photos and files. The web app really looks and works like a desktop application which is really an awesome experience.

2) Money, by Jumsoft

Money lets you keep track of your earnings and expenses, invoices and bills. What I really like about this native application is that it really just gives me what I need without being bloated with extra features that I don’t need. Very easy to use, once installed it gets you up and running in no time.

This application lets me see my overall finance situation, income, my invoices (invoiced, uninvoiced, overdue), and expenses all at a glance. If you find creating invoices day to day a chore, you can also create invoices within this application, but unfortunately you can’t customize the look of your invoices like you want them to although you can select from a few pre-designed templates.

But that’s besides the point, the ultimate purpose using this application is such that I can make financial decisions very quickly, keeping track of invoices sent to clients and filing income taxes at the end of the year. There is also a sync feature to backup and revert your data to MobileMe, so that you can see exactly the same data on different computers.

Money costs US$39 to own the program.

3) Things, by Cultured Code

In order to reduce stress, you need all your tasks, big or small, immediate or future, to be recorded instead of having them hanging around your head. Things lets you do just that. It comes with a desktop and iPhone app available at the iTunes store. You can sync both apps with both platforms wirelessly. This to-do list application lets you create tasks which you can file under “Today” (tasks you need to complete today), “Scheduled (tasks you need to complete in the future)”, “Someday (tasks you might want to consider completing) and “Next (all the task you need to complete after Today’s task, including scheduled tasks). You can even create folders under “Projects” where you can list individual tasks under each of your projects, be it your clients projects, personal projects, or even shopping lists!

You have to try using it to get the flow going, it really does makes me more productive and stress relieved especially when I have a tad too many things to handle at once. Never underestimate the act of ticking off your tasks as “done” each time you complete them, it does makes me feel more accomplished of all the things I have at hand.

Things is now available as a free beta download for your desktop, it’s still undergoing development and once it’s done you’ll have to download the full program at a US$49. You can get US$10 discount if you sign up for their newsletter now. The iPhone app is available at the iTunes store at US$9.99.

4) Evernote

This free notes taking application, Evernote, stores all your notes in the “cloud” which means you can access your notes via a web interface, free desktop application or the iPhone available for free download via iTunes. Evernote is Mac & PC compatible. You can take regular text notes which you can format the text freely using the interface on any platform, take photo notes using either your iSight/Webcam/iPhone Camera, or voice notes using your iPhone’s built in microphone. Evernote also works on Windows Mobile devices.

Notes created or edited will be synced throughout all your devices which is a very important aspect. You can also create multiple so called “Notebooks” to sort your notes into different categories.

Evernote gives you 40MB of monthly upload allowance. You can pay US$5/Month or US$45/Year to go Premium and get 500MB of monthly upload allowance.

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