Finance 6: Personal Accounting

Like most people, I always like to keep a close eye on my accounts, and especially in these days of penny watching you need to know how your money is doing. Coming from the world of Windows, I used to use MS Money and I’ll be honest, it wasn’t a bad little program (well thinking about it it perhaps wasn’t so little). The niceties that it gave me with graphs and overviews were good, but I found myself adding each line from my statements into the package after the event. Once I’d spent the money and that meant that unless I added each transaction after I’d done it, it could be up to six weeks before I finally received the statement.

So although I liked MS Money, after a few years, I decided it wasn’t showing me what I needed to know, and how I wanted to see it. So I created a budget spreadsheet, and that sheet looks forward several years and I now have at least 10 years of budgeting all available to me to check all those domestic bills. And when the Electric board asks me to increase because of inflationary costs, and also because of usage, I can tell them exactly how much I’ll be paying due to inflation and don’t tell me how much I use because I know. Yes I know that might be deemed as anally retentive, but I can assure you, it has payed off on numerous occasions.

Now as for my day to day accounts again we know how much is going out and keep a close reign on how much we spend. I hope that this money conscientious manner will be passed onto our girls, and thinking about it, I wish the bankers in the UK had maybe also thought about it, but that’s another story and for another blog post.

So I moved to the Mac and still use the budgeting spreadsheet I produced and it works. I can see what I’ve been spending, I reconcile the amounts, it’s quite simple by just coloring the cells, and I can see how much needs to go into the budget or how much will be extra. I even budget for holidays and you’ve guessed it, new Mac’s!

When Tim asked if anyone wanted to review Finance 6 I thought, yeah I’ll give it a go I’ve had some experience with some home use finance software and I have an accounting routine so perhaps it’s time to look at some Mac software rather than messing about in the spreadsheet. So what is Finance 6, well it helps you to keep track of your bank accounts and manage your budget. The key features of this application include helping you keep track of your checking, savings, and credit card accounts. With repeating transactions you can save time by entering recurring transactions once and setting them to automatically repeat. You can enter and automatically total multiple items within any credit or debit transaction, save time by crediting another account automatically within in a debit transaction. Easily reconcile your account balance with your bank statement. Set up custom credit and debit descriptions as well as labels for your transactions. Set up funds and assign rules that deduct an amount or percent from your deposits and money added into your holding account can be automatically applied to your budget, find any text in one or all of your accounts. You can also save your searches. You have a sidebar for easy access. Finance 6 provides a central location for accounts, saved searches, and balance info. You can Import quickly all account and transaction data from your old Finance 5 files.

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