Jon Plummer

Trapped on Palm?

My Twitter question about money management alternatives for iPhone hasn’t exactly borne fruit, but there are buds on the tree. I’ve been a loyal but increasingly less-satisfied Palm user since the Palm III launched in 1998. All that is preventing me from ditching Palm OS and getting an iPhone is my personal finance workflow.

Maybe I’m a weirdo

I have enjoyed accounts that always balance, zero surprises, and an enhanced ability to understand and plan the movements of my money since I started using Ultrasoft Money and Microsoft Money together in mid-2000. I could (and can!) enter bank, ATM, credit card, even cash transactions into the Palm as they happen, syncing to Microsoft Money later. This works well enough that I tolerate a relatively cumbersome process to preserve this work flow even now that I am on a Mac at home. I open Missing Sync, turn off syncing, fire up Parallels, press the sync button on my cradle, then reverse the steps to sync my calendar, etc. Seven steps where one button press used to do.

Sure, there’s Quicken for Mac and Pocket Quicken, but everyone I know who has used Quicken on the Mac says that it is a festering pile, and each subsequent version is a higher pile with more festering than the previous. No thanks.

If only…

There are a number of up-and-coming personal finance packages for Mac, including Cha-Ching , Liquid Ledger (sold as packaged software at Apple stores), MoneyDance , iCash , Checkbook , and others. None of them support the entry of records on a mobile device.

This leaves a web-based solution. Names that get bandied about here include Mint , Wesabe , and the online banking offerings of Citi, Wells Fargo, WaMu, and Back of America. But none of these allows you to enter transactions as they happen.

Wesabe to the rescue…someday?

Actually, that isn’t strictly true. If you can find the "Create a Cash Account" button buried somewhere in Wesabe’s "upload" pages, you can create a cash account that will accept your input. That’s a start. This last bit of info was pointed out to me by Marc Hedlund, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Wesabe (@ wesabe on Twitter). Marc heard my call for an iPhone-capable money management option, and mentioned that "Wesabe does that." An enlightening email conversation ensued wherein he revealed:

• They plan to make it easier to find the cash account setup functionality.
• They are working on the capability to enter transactions against other accounts.
• Auto-upload of account information gleaned from your bank is about to get a lot better, with essentially automatic support even for accounts that don’t currently support auto-update. The timeline for this was "in about a month," and we were exchanging email on new year’s day, so mid-February is probably realistic.
• They are working on making the setup of their desktop uploaders even easier. The OS X uploader needs to be manually invoked or put in your list of login items, too high a hurdle for consumer-level goods.

This looks very promising. None of the above list has launched, of course, so it isn’t real. Yet. I made some additional suggestions and complaints:

• Offering a cash account by default, and having the capability to add transactions to other accounts on by default, would require no configuration by the user (they wouldn’t have to find the spot where you turn these features on) and would seem internally consistent.
• A way to suppress an account without losing its transactions from history would be worthwhile.
• The information hierarchy around transactions is a bit messy; social content (related to the tags you give merchants and individual transactions?) is mixed right in with data about the transaction, and needs a bit of separation, for example.

Yes, but what do I really need?

After reading my extended complaining (this is hard to find, this is odd, your homepage has no background color), Marc asked the critical question: "Other than upcoming transactions, are you missing anything in what we provide today, in order to drop what you’re using now?" Ah, good. I had to think about it a bit. What parts of Microsoft Money and Ultrasoft Money did I depend on, and what could I discard? This required some thought. My list:

• Reconciliation. With updates coming rapidly from the banks, etc., this is really just a way to answer questions like: What showed up that I didn’t know about? Did I enter something in the wrong account? Why is my balance not what I expect? Am I current as of this statement?
• Recurring transactions. I make heavy use of these in Money; they’re great for paychecks, subscriptions, rent, etc. With the caveat that if a payment requires my action (such as sending a check), I need a reminder, not an auto-entry.
• Offline capability (maybe).

Those are the must-haves. I have made use of, but can live without, the next tier of features:

• Splits. Paychecks especially go into a lot of different buckets (taxes, insurance, HCRA, some to savings, some to checking, etc.). I suppose I could fake that with little constellations of recurring transactions.
• Reminders for scheduled transactions.
• Loan accounts.
• 401(k), IRA, and other investment accounts.
• Debt reduction and other planning features. The math for debt reduction planning is so simple that this could be a bit of content rather than a tool. Allowing creation of recurring transactions/reminders from such a plan would be a great feature, if the recurring transaction interface is solid.

My bad

It turns out that they do splits with a clever modification to tags; you can add a dollar amount to a tag for a particular transaction. This is easier to use than the split interfaces in Money or Quicken. They have a demo video for this feature that shows it off nicely.

As this all wound down, I told Marc I would relate my ideas about transaction view. I had better get on that (in an upcoming post). Also, the unmentioned player here is Quicken Online and their recently-announced iPhone-capable mobile version. Watch this space.