Digital Cheat Sheet

Something every college student learns is that money management is everything whether it be buying the books for your next class or being about to go and eat with your friends. Since many college students rely on credit or debit cards for the majority of their transactions keeping an up to date register could be a matter of eating or not. I suggest everybody keeping an active bank register, but sometimes it is just hard to remember and other times the managing of one is complicated and time consuming. 

The Mac developer Jumsoft has tried to alleviate this pressure by creating “Money” for the Macintosh. Money3 is marketed as “Your sweetest accounting application” and sweet it is. Money is truly a beautiful application for your Mac and does not feel like the carbon copy of Windows financial programs. The interface is slick with an iTunes feel to it. The sidebar has great looking icons and the application is also equipped with both an iTunes coverflow and album view for different categories. The interface is simple, but gives you enough power to get things done. In regard to the look and feel Money3 feels very much like another part of the operating system, like iCal or the Address book. 

The application is primarily a financial program and allows you to have multiple accounts for different bank accounts, credit cards, investments, and loans.  You can easily add transactions and payments along with any kind of extra notes about a particular item. Along with that there is the ability to keep up with bills, your stock portfolio, and invoices. Like any good financial program it automatically does the required math for you as your add in items into your various accounts. This works flawlessly, but be sure to be using the right kind of currency because if you don’t manually remove extra currencies it is easy to swap to pounds or Euros.

The smart account is a nice feature that allows you basically create a custom account type. This is handy if you want to combine accounts or isolate a particular kind of spending. Honestly, this feature works like smart folder on OS-X so you can use some crazy Boolean logic to get the exact data you want. Since my needs are lesser than some people (being a lowly college student), I did not have a lot of need for a smart account, but I figure as time goes I will certainly spend some time creating a few. 

Another interesting feature is the “Web bank” feature that will let you add in your online bank’s website into the application. Honestly the feature just runs a small, secure browser in Money3’s application window. It is nothing terribly special, but if you are doing some serious financial work not having to have an extra web browser window is handy. That being said I would have preferred that Jumsoft work out something with 1Password and allow me to save my bank password, but pulling the password from OS-X’s keychain is good enough for most people. 

Learning to budget is somebody every college student learns how to do whenever they sticks out on their own and Money leads a helping hand. The application allows you to create a budget for yourself and then will display for you how well you are doing. The budgets are customizable to a great extent and the graph that it gives you is handy. Thankfully you can have multiple budgets for different categories so I have, for example, a budget for gasoline, food, and video games. Unfortunately if you have go over budget you do not receive any kind of visual or audio quos to warn you. I would have preferred a popup, a color change, or maybe the ability to send yourself a warning email.

 The application does have the ability to send invoices and possesses an inventory system for you to use. I did not find these features particularly complete for a small business and proved kind of useless for a college student. Having database integration with something like Excel, Numbers, or Bento’s Filemaker would help to fix this problem. I did not test the invoices feature so I cannot attest to how good it is, but just by playing with some number it seemed competent enough with the basic inventory system in place. 

One of the best features about Money is the reporting feature. You can get the application to automatically produce charts and graphs of where all of your money is going. With the reporting feature you can have all of your financial information put into nice charts, graphs, and pie charts to view, email, or print. This feature is particularly powerful if you combine it with a custom smart account. My only grip is that I would have liked a little bit easier instructions to get a report running, a help wizard would have been nice considering the complexity that you can get into with these reports. 

Probably my favorite feature of Money3 is its companion iPhone application that allows you to work on the go. I found the application beautiful and fast like the desktop application and loved how it synced back flawlessly. The iPhone application retains many of the ability to add/delete transactions, manage budgets, and view reports. My only grip about the iPhone application is that syncing via MobileMe would be been ideal and having your monthly reports sync back and forth would have been nicer than having to recreate them on the iPhone. All of that being said the iPhone application is free and you can use it without having to own the Mac desktop version so it is really hard to complain about a free application too much.

Verdict:

Money3 is a great application to keep track of your personal finances on your Mac. The application is full-featured, easy to use, and competent enough for most of your needs. I would have liked a little more online support with the ability to automatically update online accounts. Entering everything by hand works fine, but the option for a little automation would have been nice. All of that being said, I would recommend anybody interested in keeping track of their finances on their Mac look into Money3 as a viable option. The application will only run you $39.99 and you get an excellent, free iPhone application to sync with.

Money3

Version: 3.4.8

Company: Jumsoft

Website: http://www.jumsoft.com/money/

Price: $39.99 

Pro: Beautiful, powerful, and has a great iPhone application.

Con: Lacks automated online banking accounts.

Rating:

 4/5 

*Review Copy Provided by Jumsoft