Truth be told, I just missed making a payment for one of my credit cards, not because I forgot to pay but because the letter wasn’t sent to me. I’m not sure why, but had I used Chronicle, I would have noticed something was amiss when the payment was soon to be due. This is the second time I missed a payment, the first time was because the date reflected on the internet banking site wasn’t updated.

Using Chronicle, you can organize and track your bills but most importantly, it helps prevent a missed payment.

While spending some time using Chronicle, I can understand the other crucial mission of this app. It is to let you set it and forget it. Forget about your bills with confidence!

User Interface

Chronicle spots a wood like interface but it doesn’t stop there. You can change the theme to other alternate colors eg:

Dark Theme

Tranquil Theme

Right from the interface, you can see at a glance how many bills you have, how many are paid or due. If you’ve made a payment for any bill, click “Log Payment” and this will go down in a graph of payment histories which we will talk about later.

Adding A New Bill

From the screenshot, it may look a little busy but there are only a couple of simple fields to fill in. Name of the bill, payment due date, if the bill repeats or not and what is the frequency, amount due and how many days before do you want iCal to remind you.

If your bill is paid online, enter a URL so that you can pay a bill online with a click of a button.

Lastly, choose one of the many colorful icons to represent the bill.

When you hit “Save Bill”, Chronicle opens up iCal to insert a calendar event for your bill and quickly closes iCal.

iCal Integration

By automatically creating a calendar event in iCal, you will be reminded when the due date for a payment is near. Not only will you get reminded on your Mac, if you have an iPhone, you will automatically be reminded via your iPhone too if your iCal is synced with your iPhone.

Logging Payment & Add Receipts

When you log payment, you have the option to add a receipt. This is handy if you ever get audited by the accountants.

Optionally add a note and say something like “I bought an iPad for my loved one”.

Spending History

Seeing your spending history on a graph are both fun and useful. You will be able to tell a lot from your spending trends. See which months you spend money most and rectify. If you are disciplined and is serious about your finances, the spending graph should be enough to scare you into spending lesser.

Goals

This is more for people who are in debt. Setting a goal gives you a higher chance of achieving something. If you have a reasonably large balance on your credit card for example, set a goal on when you want to have the debt paid off.

Conclusion

If you are a working adult with many bills to pay, you definitely need some sort of system to manage your bills. It is like project management, there are just too many things floating around your head which you need to settle them down.

Chronicle lets you do that in a well designed and customizable interface. With many useful features pertaining to bills management like iCal integration, adding of receipts, spending history reports and setting of goals to pay off a debt, Chronicle is hell of an app to save your sanity and money.

Giveaway!

Thanks to Mike from Littlefin, one of you will get one of 3 free copies of Chronicle worth $20.95 each.

Just leave a comment and tell us what kind of bills are you paying every month, eg. rent, credit cards, mobile phone, web apps subscription etc.

This giveaway will end on the 25th April, so go on and comment to get a chance to get Chronicle for free. :)

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool:

If you run any kind of business (freelance, a company etc), you’ll need to keep receipts for any purchases made under the name of your business. The problem with keeping receipts is that the ink wear out very quickly. In the course of one year when it’s time to do your taxes, you’ll realize that most of your receipts become unreadable.

Scanning receipts and keeping them digitally, either on a dedicated folder on your Mac, or attach them in a finance software like Cha-Ching, can be a much better idea. But most people don’t like the idea of spending too much time scanning receipts with their scanner (steps include powering up the scanner, loading a preview and scan). Yes you can conveniently use Shoeboxed to scan your receipts for you if you don’t mind forking out a monthly fee ($9.95/month to start).

2 iPhone Apps To Digitize Your Receipts

If you have an iPhone, you only need to get two apps (5 bucks in total) to handle the digitizing of your receipts:

JotNot Scan
[$3.99 | Website | iTunes]

JotNot can scan your receipts by taking a picture of the receipt (can be done in the app itself), define the four corners of the receipt, the app will process the image of the receipt into a sharp looking version. I was skeptical about the image quality at first but was impressed by how the end result looked so sharp and “scanned-like”.

QuickPic
[$0.99 | Website | iTunes]

QuickPic basically lets you get an image out of your iPhone’s photo library or camera roll easily. You only need a web browser to do this. This is a time saving tool to get the scanned receipt using JotNot Scan out of your iPhone.

Here’s 4 steps to digitize your receipts with your iPhone:

Step 1

Take a picture of your receipt using JotNot Scan or import the image of the receipt you’ve previously taken before launching JotNot Scan:

Step 2

Define the 4 corners of the receipt by dragging the red circles to every corner:

Step 3

Once done, hit the “Process” button at the top right and you’ll see the result after the app processes the image. Save the image (your saved receipt will appear in the camera roll).

Step 4

Use QuickPic to get the receipt out of your camera roll easily, without this app you’ll need to email the receipt to yourself or use iPhoto to extract the image after docking your iPhone.

Launch QuickPic and choose your previously processed receipt using JotNot scan.

You’ll see your receipt in the window with a URL to download the image.

Enter the URL into your web browser and you’ll be able to view / download the receipt simply by dragging and dropping the image onto your desktop!

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The process looks like a long one with this seemingly long post, but I just want to be as detailed as possible by listing down all the steps clearly with the appropriate screenshots. Try it and you’ll find that it’s actually just two simple steps, snap your receipt with JotNot Scan and getting the image out of your iPhone with QuickPic.

I hope you find this tip useful, if you have any thoughts or suggestions please leave a comment.

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool: