Money Managers for Mac OS: Roundup

There’s a recession on, so if you’re anxious about money maybe you need to up your software arsenal. Before I get started just bear with me: money management doesn’t have to be boring. Take a look at any of the applications here and you’ll be surprised by how exciting Mac developers can make finances look. And I’m not talking about ridiculous 3D graphs, I’m talking about simple uses of Apple’s Core Image and Core Animation APIs.

Cha-Ching

There’s dozens, if not hundreds of money managers out there for Mac OS. Of course there’s the 100 pound gorilla Quicken, but beyond that there’s several new and exciting products. The first of these that caught my eye was Cha-Ching back in 2007. It was one of the first finance applications I thought looked really Mac-friendly. Cha-Ching is made by Midnight Apps in association with Sofa, who make cool things you might have seen like Disco.

Unlike a lot of software Cha-Ching makes it easy to get going. They even have an example database so you can experiment without having to enter all your accounts. As a British user I immediately noticed the American terminology: I don’t really think about money in terms of checking accounts (also we spell it cheque). However, it still works beyond the minor terminology gripes.

The main features are focused around home finances and small business. You can set up scheduled payments for regular transactions like bills. There’s Mac-friendly user-interface tweaks like Address Book integration so it’s easy to add the parties responsible for payments. An integrated browser provides quick access to online banks. And smart folders (just like Smart Playlists in iTunes) let you build views based on text searches, tags and dates. You can also add images to transactions, which makes it easier for those of you who better with images than text.

The budgeting interface in Cha-Ching is intuitive: set tags for incoming vs. outgoing transactions, then it’ll search a time period (default is this month). A definite recession-freindly feature.

Cha-Ching costs $40, which is about £28 at the current exchange rate. They have a blog called Midnight Apps Development Blog, so you can see they’re still working on new features (last update was 30th November 2008).

Money

Money by Jumsoft uses all the modern Leopard features to present an elegant interface. If you saw screenshots of it without seeing the name you’d never guess it was an accounting package. It has similar features to Cha-Ching: multiple account types, budgeting (based on categories), integrated web browser for online banks and categories. It’s slightly more traditional in a way, though. It has reports rather than Smart Folders, and the general interface is more like a spreadsheet. Cha-Ching makes each transaction feel like a big deal, especially with support for images (product photos). Unlike Cha-Ching, the developers generally seem to be careful to use terms that are internationally friendly (either that or their regionalisation picks it up).

Money adds features like invoicing, making it easy to track overdue invoices. You can preview sets of them with Coverflow, which might make it easy to flick through them or try a new layout style. The invoice structures are fixed as far as I can tell. This is fine for most invoices, but it’s difficult to make sense of them if you’re a consultant who bills by time. Another minor gripe is I can’t seem to get the list of payees from my Mac’s Address Book. There might be a way to import them but I can’t find it.

Money and Cha-Ching definitely occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. Money is solid, simple, quick to enter data into, and makes a lot of sense for small businesses (especially with invoicing). Cha-Ching shows big pictures of things you bought, and the developers clearly worked hard to implement iTunes and iWork-style features where they matter: I’d prefer Smart Playlist style reports over Coverflow for example. Coreflow might look cool but it doesn’t really help you manage money.

Money costs $39 (£27.50), which seems suspiciously like Cha-Ching’s price minus 1 dollar.

Cents

It’s pointless to compare Cents to Cha-Ching and Money: it’s a tiny app that costs $4.99 which lets you post quick notes about spending. The thing is, it looks cool, and it’s also a really clever use of Apple’s notification area. Assign a shortcut to quickly pop it up, and bam, enter expenses just as Amazon’s taken your card details.

It features an export that’ll work with Cha-Ching and shows a total when you hover. That’s about all it does. Perhaps if Cents was integrated with the other apps so it automatically posted data it’d be more useful, but if all you need is a little expense tracker try it out. There’s a MacApper review about cents if you want to read more.

Others

iBank is like a cross between Cha-Ching and Money. It’s got a lot of features, including investments, Smart Folder-style accounts, iCal integration and a list that would take me hours to repeat. They seem proud of their pie charts, so I think someone should introduce them to Stephen Few’s eloquent analysis of why they’re generally crap. Squirrel is a bit more focused than iBank, and is very focused on crazy 3D shaded graphs. Again, MacApper has a review of it: Squirrel: Simple, Organized Finance Management.