14 DAY TRIAL // As long as you have a place to sleep and something to put on the table, you're already doing better than an incredibly large number of people that live on planet Earth; however, another large number of people, while having more than enough, keep complaining that money is not enough, about how hard is to live and other similar statements.
Well, the time has come to wake up! What these people need is proper management, no matter if their income is below 500$ or over 1,000,000,000$ per month. After all, if I sit back and think for a while, we all need to manage our expenses carefully, since the fact that we're doing just well doesn't mean that some of our expenses are not simply money thrown out of the window that could be used better for other purposes than the current ones. Obviously, the pen and notebook management era is dead, so let's move to a modern device able to help us - the Mac and a software built precisely to help you manage your finances...
My target today is called FinanceToGo and comes from Fastforward Software, a company located in Sheffield, England. Its last version, 1.1, was released earlier this month, providing an easy to use finance management solution to individuals and small businesses. Available as a demo version free to download and use, this application comes as a Universal Binary that runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs. Although I was expecting it to be larger, the setup package is only 3.6 MB in size, so everybody should download it pretty fast.
If you are already trembling, waiting for me to describe a complicated setup procedure, then you should calm down, because once you mount the DMG image, there's only a drag and drop operation for you to do before being able to actually start using the program. I hope I won't bother you, but before anything else, I should inform you about the approach used by FinanceToGo in dealing with your daily money...
FinanceToGo is a software application based on the principles of double entry bookkeeping (also known as "double entry accounting") system that is the basis of the standard system used to record financial transactions all over the world. Since not all users of this program should be into the accountancy field, you should know at least the basics of what's behind the software you're using, and that's why I am telling you about this, because I found myself more than once using programs that made me study the roots of various sciences to understand them better.
The premise of the double entry accounting is that the financial condition and results of operations are best represented by a certain number of variables, called accounts, with each of them representing a particular aspect of the business or individual/household as a monetary value. Using this approach, every transaction is recorded by entries done in at least two accounts, and the total of the debit values must be equal to the total value of the credit values, starting from the premise that any monetary transaction must logically affect two aspect of a company. As an example, when purchasing an item, it must be paid for too, so the Debit Inventory and Debit Bank Account will be changed accordingly. Obviously, in some cases, a transaction can affect three or more variables, but I'll stop here and move to the program instead...
FinanceToGo has an interface that's really easy to use and looks just fine. The toolbar buttons can take you to each of the main areas of this program, and there are exactly eleven such areas, each being represented by a well designed, suggestive icon. All the graphical and text content available inside the program is easy to read and understand, and most important operations have keyboard shortcuts associated to facilitate faster access.
As it happens with most programs that require data entry and analysis, the best path to follow if you want to learn its basics is to load a sample data file and browse through all the areas of the program, and this is exactly what I am going to do now. This program comes with a built in data file, called simply "Tutorial", so I advise you to open it.
Unfortunately, each time you open the program or a data file, you have to face a nag screen, but that won't happen anymore once you decide that FinanceToGo is worth its price of 44.95$. Now, let's move on and check its features while exploring the areas available...
First of all, the Overview area contains automatically generated bar and pie charts of your financial data, so if you want to see how your company is going once you entered the last transactions, just check back here.
The next area is called Transcations, and its purpose is to give you a detailed list of your actual, recurring and generated transactions, with the possibility of easily searching for a certain one using the quick search box.
The Accounts area allows you to manage profit and loss, debt, as well as your liquid and fixed assets. For each of these, you can check the automatically updated cashflow charts and individual transactions that were made.
In the Categories area, you can manage income, expenses and transfers categories, but you should know that default categories and accounts are added to the new documents that you create automatically, to help you save time, so all you have to do first is see if you need any additional ones.
The Shares, Budgets and Currencies area help you keep track of your stock portfolio, if you have one, define budgets to compare and predict spending year-on-year, as well as to give you the power to work using multiple currencies at once with ease.
Next, we have the Reports tool that allows you to print your Balance Sheet in an instant, and the Import area, used to configure import of Quicken QIF and Dexia Online files.
At last, the File Settings and Customize areas take care of most customizable options of the program, including the tools available on the toolbar, everything being as easy as possible for most people.
These being said, there's nothing else to do than draw the conclusions and check some screenshots, before downloading this handy program to see it all for yourselves...
The Good
The Bad
The Truth
Check out the screenshots here:
