moneyGuru review

I've had reasons to become a bit more fiscally responsible of late (having gotten married and gone into debt — unrelated of course! — and I've also fallen in as the treasurer for a non-profit group), I've had reason to find an application for recording and managing finances.

I came across one called moneyGuru some months ago and have for various reasons stuck with it (where iBank, GNU Cash, Quicken, MYOB and some others I didn't try long enough to even remember, got left behind). So I thought I'd share some reasons why moneyGuru became my application of choice for tracking my finances.

Now everyone's needs are different, of course, so let me state mine up front: I'm not after all that much from financial software; I want to be able to create some kind of categorised budget and see if I'm sticking to it, and see roughly where the money goes. For our personal finances, we needed to make a rough budget of regular expenses and see if we could afford loan repayments. As for the non-profit group, I need to categorise expenses and incoming money for reporting purposes, and make sure we're not spending more than our budget. I also wanted to find a cross-platform program that's likely to be around a while, so that when I move on from the treasury position, the next person can still use the software (the old records were in the ATO's e-Record system which was no longer available when I needed it!).

What I don't need is payroll software, GST/sales tax support, PAYG and other tax support, capital gains, asset management, etc, which some of the more complex/expensive software does (Quicken/MYOB). I don't need it, so don't want to pay for it, and to some extent don't even want it in the software I use — I'm not a professional accountant, and know only a little of the terminology, so having too many features just gets in the way of learning the basics.

So moneyGuru...

Price — It's not free, but it's fair. Something that various developers and some musicians, and even some restaurants have started doing in recent years is letting you choose how much to pay for their products. I quite like the concept, at least for electronic distribution, though probably because I'm a bit cheap (in my defence, I've been a student for many years so it's not entirely by choice). So I was able to pick a fairly arbitrary amount to pay for moneyGuru, and then, after checking what others had paid recently, and feeling a bit guilty, I doubled it and felt I was probably paying a fair price.

Sure, this made it more expensive than GNU Cash (which is free), but I chose a price cheaper than the more expensive financial software, since I didn't want to buy all those extra features I just don't need (and of course wasn't buying them here). What I was really paying for was avoiding some of the hassle of just using spreadsheets, which had been sufficient (though a little tedious) in the past.

One interesting novelty that the developer (HardCoded Software) provides is an account of how many hours they have or haven't been paid for their work on their applications. Some are in excess, some are in deficit, so if you're feeling extra generous, you might want to pay a little more to make up for those who haven't paid for his time.

Supported Operating Systems — It's cross-platform and runs much the same on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. GNU Cash also does this, most others don't. MoneyGuru looks pretty much identical on each, and the features all match up (it's not like Microsoft Office, where the Mac and Windows variants are quite different beasts).

User Interface — It looks nice on my Mac. Much nicer than GNU Cash. And it's not just looks, it's less fiddly than most cross-platform apps, which usually rely on old, outdated widgets, which usually don't support tabbing around and default buttons, meaning you're reaching for the mouse a lot. MoneyGuru uses native widgets and has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, so I can happily work with just the keyboard — the mouse is fine for many jobs, but it has no place in data entry!

Developer Support — One thing that always attracts me towards software is when developers have bug/issue trackers and regular involvement in them. I like giving feedback to developers, and do so on pretty much every application I use regularly (usually, and preferably, by participating in online issue-trackers). Some developers love it and have quickly sent back beta versions for testing, some tell me the bug-fix or feature request is already on their list of things to do (and years later remains undone), some just ignore it (who knows if they've even read it, I usually assume they've given up on the project). So seeing the developer active and responsive on the moneyGuru issue tracker is a great sign for me, and better yet, visibly accepting/rejecting feature suggestions, bug fixes, etc. There's also active support forums for getting help.

Features — Well it does everything I need, and just about everything I want. I can track my accounts, both savings and debts, as well as the cash in my wallet or under the mattress, and can categorise income and expenses very easily. It also lets me import data directly from CSV, QIF and QFX files downloaded from my financial institutions, which means data entry is only really necessary for cash expenses. I won't explain how it all works, as there's a decent manual to do that.

The budget system is usable, though designed for future expenses rather than for checking whether you kept to your budget or not (however an overhaul of the budget system is apparently on the way). There's some pretty graphs for displaying financial history or current status if that makes more sense to you than just numbers. And you can easily look at specific date ranges (months/quarters/years/financial years/custom ranges) to make comparisons between them (though direct graphical comparisons would be a nice feature, also apparently on the way).

Comparisons

• Compared to iBank, moneyGuru isn't quite as pretty, the graphs are less extensive/customisable, it doesn't sync with your iPhone and it doesn't handle your shares/stocks. Then again, I didn't pay for those features. Also moneyGuru can run on Windows/Linux, so if sharing financial info is important, that may be too. I'd probably get iBank if I could justify the cost.
• Compared to Quicken/MYOB, moneyGuru lacks a lot of professional accounting features, but as before, you don't need to pay for them if you don't need them. If I was a professional accountant, or running my own business, I'd be using professional financial software.
• Compared to GNU Cash, moneyGuru is much prettier and simpler to work with. For my money, there's a lot to be said about a really usable and sensible UI, and moneyGuru is one of the few cross-platform applications that manages to still seem Mac-like despite its compatibility.

Summary — If you don't have a complex financial situation, but want to track your finances and budget, then moneyGuru is a very usable solution with a fair price. Complex finances, business owners and professional accountants are going to need something more advanced, and if money's not an issue then iBank is a little prettier and has a few more features.

Finally, in case it needs to be stated, I am not in any way connected to the developers/projects in this post, other than through bug-reports, feature requests and buying/trialling their software.

ATO e-Record Downloads

This is not breaking news in any sense, but something I've just had to work around.

For some years, the ATO has provided a program called E-Record that lets small businesses and organisations keep financial records. It was free, it worked, it satisfied various reporting requirements, etc... but then they decided it was too much hassle to keep updating it. In July 2010 they removed the download and in September stopped supporting it altogether. That's all good and well and I'm not going to rant about how they should be supporting small businesses with free accounting software; it's ultimately their call to can it (and there's plenty of software around that's really not that expensive).

But... it's really rather awkward when you find that you need to open old records that are in the ATO's E-Record proprietary, binary format, and you can't actually download their software to open them.

So... after a lot of digging (and failing to find any other software that can open the *.ifm files), I've managed to find some installers for E-Records around the Internet.

Firstly, there's this Computer-Aid website that's "selling" the old installers for $6 (they claim to recover bandwidth costs, but I'm not convinced a 15 MB download costs $6). If you're feeling generous (and to be fair, its not a big price for accessing your old records) then by all means grab a copy there.

I did a bit of asking around and managed to find some installers, which are now hosted on DropBox (if you're new to DropBox and decide to sign up, please use my referral link!)

• Windows E-Records v6.2
• Windows E-Records v6.1
• Mac E-Records v6.2 (requires Rosetta if you're on an Intel Mac with OS X)

Please run an up-to-date virus scanner over these before you open/install them! I got these from other people who I don't know — not the official website (since it's long gone!). If you don't check them yourself, you're putting a lot of blind faith, not only in me, but in various people that I've contacted randomly on forums... You don't even know me (probably), let alone the random people I got these installers from. So scan it! Better still, run it on a 'throw-away' virtual machine.

iPhone e-mail photo resizing — which one should I pick?

So the iPhone running iOS4 now offers to resize any photos attached to an email, just after you hit the send button. Quite a useful feature (does anyone really need a full 3 or 5 MP picture of your latest meal/injury/novelty vegetable/...?).

It offers

• Small (~10's of kBs),
• Medium (~100's of kBs),
• Large (~1000 kB), or
• Original Size (2, 3 or 5 MP depending on your iPhone model)

But it doesn't actually tell you the dimensions of the images, only file sizes.

So for those interested, here are the dimensions in pixels, and approximate viewing sizes at three different resolutions: 100, 163 and 300 dpi, typical for a monitor, iPhone and a good quality photo print respectively.

Small — 320 x 240 (8 x 6 cm, 5 x 3.7 cm, 2.7 x 2 cm)

Medium — 640 x 480 (16 x 12 cm, 10 x 7.5 cm, 5.4 x 4 cm)

Large — 1280 x 960 (32 x 24 cm, 20 x 15 cm, 10.8 x 8.1 cm)

(all figures rounded to 1-2 sig figs as I felt like at the time, the dpi's are similarly accurate by the way — do the maths yourself if you need accuracy!)

It may be worth noting that the iPhone 2G/3G/3Gs has a screen resolution of 480 x 320, so even the small one will fill a decent chunk of that screen, and medium is ample to cover it. The iPhone 4 has a screen resolution of 960 x 640, so medium will fill ~2/3 of the screen and large will cover it entirely.

So how does it look at full screen on your phone? (i.e. how you're seeing it by default in the Photos app)

• If it looks okay and you have no desire to zoom in, small or perhaps medium sized images will be fine for anyone.
• If you need to zoom in to see about 1/4 of the image at a time, send a large version.
• If you're zooming further or want to print it, send the original size image.

While their device might have a different resolution, if all the detail is there in your full screen image, then it'll be there on theirs.

Browser for your OS X Time Machine Backups

Apple's Time Machine backup system for OS X is great. So far, thankfully, I've not had to rely on it (see below), and I guess that will be the real test as to whether it truly is as great as I believe it to be, but for now I really like it. It basically (see below) stays out of the way, runs entirely on its own, backs up in a smart way, and generally just works...

Backing up involves me remembering to plug my external hard drive in that sits on my desk. This is fairly easy for me since it's plugged into the same USB hub as my mouse, iPhone dock & camera cable... The only time I've had to use it is when I've accidentally deleted a file or two, nothing catastrophic, so I guess I can't really sing praises too highly until I actually attempt to restore my laptop from it.

The one issue that's come up a few times for me is that I'll want to unplug everything to go home from work and I'll notice it's still backing up, and it'll be doing some massive 1.5 GB or so backup... d'oh. But... why? I have no idea what it's backing up (sometimes I've just forgotten, for example, that I upgraded XCode earlier), and there's no way to see what it's actually doing. For that matter, what is the difference between each successive backup? The Apple Time Machine browser lets you see what's there at any point in time, but the curious are left unsatisfied, being unable to see how big individual backups are, or what's changed between versions. (At this stage I should point out to those unfamiliar with Time Machine that it makes incremental backups, so it only has to store the changes made to the disk rather than a full copy every single time).

I recently found a (very beta/pre-release) application called TimeTracker [download] from CharlesSoft (with the very apt tag-line of "software you always wished someone else would write" — I've been wishing for about a year for this app).

It lets you see a list of all the backups in the Time Machine database, how big each backup is (i.e. the size of the changes on the disk for that particular backup — not the entire size of all data backed up), and most importantly lets you browse through the backup seeing just the files that changed. So when you're wondering why Time Machine is suddenly backing up 200 MB every hour or two you can look back and see what folder it's all in... (Turns out Google Chrome on OS X doesn't store its cached webpages etc in the ~/Library/Caches like all good little OS X apps should *tsk tsk*).

TimeTracker Screenshot (the '0 bytes' backups are just ones I've not yet clicked on)

So, if you're like me, and you have no desire to backup caches, build directories from code projects, and sources files or data that you have backed up elsewhere, you can go into TimeTracker to see what's being pointlessly backed up and then:

1. Open up the Time Machine browser (aka "Enter Time Machine"), right click on the unnecessary item, and select Delete all Backups of "..." to delete all the past backups of the item.
2. Open up the Time Machine preference pane, click Options and add an exclusion for the unnecessary item so it doesn't get backed up in future.

As I said before, TimeTracker is fairly beta (it has no icon for example, and a couple of minor bugs) but for occasional use by the curious Time Machine operator, it's great!

For the especially curious, once you've gone and delete an item from your Time Machine backups, you may want to go into your ~/Library/Caches/com.charlessoft.TimeTracker/Backups/ folder and remove the contents so it refreshes the file/directory tree of the backups (otherwise it won't update the trees to show you the new sizes/files after you delete something).

iTunes in the Mix — Fanboy Rant

About once a month or so I stumble across some software feature that reassures my faith in the genius of certain programmers/software designers. These tend to be in Apple, Google or Canon products, though plenty of smaller software companies/developers have pleasantly surprised me equally well (I'm on a bit of a Connected Flow fanboy-high at the moment, for example).

I've actually had two such pleasant surprises in the last week. Both with iTunes 9.

Compound Smart Playlist Rules

Last week, when I installed iTunes 9, the first thing I did (as with each new version) was check if they'd finally implemented a more comprehensive mechanism for settings 'rules' up for Smart Playlists. I was pretty happy to find they had finally done so.

Basically, instead of making a playlist that can match "any" or "all" of a single list of rules, you can now create sub-rules (effectively allowing brackets in search/logic terms). For example, you could have a playlist (for your iPod/iPhone) that includes all songs rated 3+ or that you've listened to more than 5 times, but excludes the ones you've listened to in the last week and excludes the classical music that you only listen to when working on your laptop...

This could be done in earlier versions as well, except that you had to create intermediate Smart Playlists for each sub-rule (i.e. one to match the sub-rules, like the "play count > 4" OR "rating > 2", and then another to match the outer 'all' rule). It was messy. This is less messy. I'm happy.

Failings / Suggestions

It's not perfect of course. I'd like to be able to make variables of my own, for example the ratio of Play Count to Skip Count (maybe I used to like a song a lot, but now I skip it all the time...). Also if the variables could be stored as part of the main database, I could make variables indicating how 'neglected' a song is (some formula to represent how much I like it from play-count/rating or dislike it from skip-count, and how recently I've played it) to put these songs onto my iPhone preferentially over others. I know, I know, I'm getting pretty picky here, but I thought I had to suggest something :P

Genius Mixes

Today's awesome feature discovery was iTunes 9's Genius Mixes feature. It's been sitting there for about a week now, but I only just realised what it actually does. Basically it's made 12 categories out of my music library, letting me select music based on mood/genre/some kind of qualitative term like that.

It seems to have made some very sensible groups for me (though I imagine it won't work for everyone's music collection), letting me easily put my music on shuffle with a specific theme or mood in mind. As someone who almost never listens to albums, always shuffles, this is great for me.

There are plenty of guides on how to set it up, but the basic gist is you need Genius enabled (see the Store menu) to get access to the mixes.

Failings / Suggestions

It does of course have a few issues. The names of each list really suck. I have six mixes called "Rock Mix" for example (sure, it's enumerated them, but that's not that useful). Whether that's because iTunes Genius classifies the songs as Rock or whether it's reading the Genre tags on my MP3s (which I think are mostly from CDDB), they're fairly silly Genius Mix titles. I like the clustering, but as with all classification problems, knowing exactly what you've classified isn't always easy. I'd suggest they allow people to rename the mixes, but that would assume/require that the clustering algorithm consistently generates the same song clusters (which I'm quite sure it won't — I'm quite sure my own listening habits and those of others contributing to Genius will change where boundaries are drawn between clusters over time).

So the names suck, but the Genius Mixes themselves are quite good, and I think they know this because they've listed a few artists under each mix to give you an idea of what is in it. If you know the artists in your music collection, you're going to know which mix you want to hear.

Another problem with it is that you can't see what's in each Genius Mix. There's currently no way to access a list of songs in the mix (or even a sample of the mix) except for the currently playing song (which, of course, you can only see by playing the mix). So might be good if they opened up the box a little on this one.

It'd be nice also if they had Genius mixes on the iPhone/iPod, generated automatically from the songs you've chosen to sync to the device. While you can sync the Genius Mixes themselves (though the interface only displays their sometimes-unhelpful-name, not the artists, so having 6 Rock Mixes kinda sucks for picking the one you like), you can't have it generate Genius Mixes automatically based on the (limited) library of your music device.

End Fanboy Rant

Anyway, I'm a fan of iTunes 9. Two pretty cool features that make it suck less, and make me a happier iTunes user.