A lot of usability and polish on my favorite budgeting tool.
When MoneyWell 2.0 came out, I fell in love with the "inverted" envelope system they offered, and accepted the flaws and bugs in the app because I had the patience and technical wherewithal to work around them. I couldnt recommend the app to my mom and girlfriend. 2.0.2 removed a lot of the bugs, but still had some confusing UX elements. Most of those have gone with 2.1, and I am now fully urging my family members to buy and use the app (the sale through 7 August is only icing on the persuasion cake!). The "unified view" of all accounts and buckets in the sidebar makes it much faster to switch between categories, and I really love the new interactive bucket fill process, with a sheet that comes down to show you what events are about to be filled, and allows you to alter the fill if your priorities are a little different than those of the default fill order--now you can choose to fill your rent bill before the cable TV bill thats coming due on the same day!
Simply put, I love the envelope system, but was always frustrated by other apps that allowed you to prescribe a certain amount per week/month for a given budget, but provided little help when it was clear you were grossly overspending or underaccounting for expenses. This resulted in too much budget tweaking and frustration. Being able to build up my monthly budget by describing how often I, say, go out to eat and how much I typically spend (say, $3.50 for lunch on MTWF each week, and $12 on Thursday when I go out with friends) and deriving a budget from that (then realize Im spending a lot per month, and tweaking my budget down by making myself reduce or cut out invidivual events) is a lot more useful to me--instead of budgeting $200 for gas each month then grimacing when I go over, I can note that I typically buy $35 of gas each time I stop (typically once a week), and can tweak how many times I stop in a month, or how much I buy at once to quickly change my budget as I limit travel or the price of gas changes. Its great.
Im withholding my fifth star for two lacking use cases, which are secondary to the main app, but I feel I would use on a regular basis. Firstly, Id like a type of bucket geared around a savings goal. Instead of saying "I plan to go on vacation once per year and spend $5000, so break that up by month", Id like to say "Im saving up $7000 for an engagement ring that I want to buy by next February. Im putting X in per paycheck; will I hit my goal ahead of schedule? When will I hit $7000 at my current rate?" I can of course do this with a calculator, but that can technically be said with most of the features of this app--the value comes from the app making my job easier than a calculator or spreadsheet would. Being able to increase and decrease my contributions towards various goals on the fly would be greatly useful. I know theyre working on this feature, so consider the fifth star a ransom until they give it to me :)
The other missing feature for me is probably much easier to cover (and about which Ill be posting on the support forums)--I can add E*Trade to my MoneyWell file, at which point it will monitor monetary transactions (basically, the sweep account in E*Trade), and it even knows that I have a particular stock in my account, listing the symbol in my "Securities" section in the sidebar. It doesnt, however, seem to acknowledge any quantities transactions or transactions of shares of those securities, however. I can see the money leave my sweep account when I buy a stock, but no shares are added to my securities page. Likewise, I cant seem to find a way to manually enter the number of shares I own, or record transactions of securities. I dont think this would cause me to withhold that fifth star if the savings goal feature is added, but its certainly a contributing factor to the rating.
The only other minor problem I have is that the center view on the screen (the transaction list and graph) dont always update when I change buckets or accounts in the sidebar. This is an existing issue, but seems to be much less common in this version (Ive only had it happen a handful of times over the many weeks Ive been using the 2.1 beta). Its not so confusing to me, and at worse I can still save the file and restart the app with no harm done, but I imagine this would be very frustrating for the typical user, in the rare occasion that it happens. All of that said, NoThirst makes it a point to respond to threads on their support forum as quickly as possible, have been very friendly and other users on the board are extremely helpful too if they happen to know the answer before a support person can get to you; major points for the whole support process as I wrestled with the first few versions of the app.
All in all, a very solid app that reimagines a decades-old but still well loved budgeting method, turning it on its head so you can describe your expenditures and make the computer do the planning for you.
Matthias215 about MoneyWell
