Why are Spreadsheet Applications Still Better Than Personal Finance Applications?

I spent about 4 hours yesterday trying to get back to basic finance and tracking my own cash flows. It’s trite to do these kind of things but it’s necessary. I once handled book of accounts of our business and it was frustrating in several different ways. However it was simple - it was a spreadsheet that showed cash inflows and outflows and a record of all our inventory. I have reason to believe that spreadsheet applications (Excel or its open source alternatives) are better than using “simply inefficient” applications that never seem to meet your needs.

My goal for using a personal finance app is to have control of outflows and still account for contingencies by doing budgeting. It doesn’t matter how much you have, it’ how well you use it.

Since I am a Mac user now, I don’t have too many app choices I guess. I am trying iFinance for a while because it seems to fulfill the basic things I need regarding personal finance tracking and budgeting.

iFinance Review

Good Things About It:

The interface is good including the charts.

It’s simple to use and it seems to have all the fields required.

Has the ability to archive a database

Supports multiple currencies including our local currency, Philippine Peso

Bad Things About It:

You can only export a specific account (bank/credit card) to CSV format.

There seems to be no way to enter data for previous months. So if you start on March, you cannot enter record for February.

I am Rubyist and have been looking at options for personal finance in Ruby. I think there a few good open source options and I just want to share my experience with some.

Enter Jamis Buck’s project with MIT license - Bucketwise. Bucketwise installation is frustrating just as nearly all Rails app installation are frustrating even for developers like myself. I couldn’t test some of its features due to application errors. So I couldn’t even give it a decent review.

HTML sucks all the joy out of programming for me HTML+CSS, that is why I’m so glad I don’t have to do the design work for our apps I’m trying to design a simple form and I am hating life/ It is seriously making me want to not work on this anymore … html makes it so easy to write forms that look like crap and SO HARD to write forms that look nice that’s so backwards

Jamis Buck, Signal vs. Noise [Fly on the Wall], July 17, 2007

That quote explains why the interface isn’t that good. It also got me thinking that perhaps that personal finance applications do not need a web interface.

Google Spreadsheets

If you absolutely feel a need for a web interface, the simplest app that would do well for Personal Finance is Google Spreadsheet.

Developers can also take advantage of the API to create graphs for reports.