Cash in hand
Describing MoneyWiz as the best- looking personal finance
app risks an accusation of damning with faint praise. But ignoring the
uniformly conservative look of rival apps, MoneyWiz is notable for its gorgeous
design. Luckily, its appeal doesn’t end there: it’s as functional as it is
attractive.
Money in, money out. The Scheduled window shows upcoming transactions in a
calendar, and lists them individually in more detail below
The iOS heritage of MoneyWiz is clear, and it looks
remarkably similar to the iPad version. A pane on the left gives access to your
accounts, budgets, scheduled transactions and reports. Clicking each heading
smoothly reveals more detail about each.
The main window presents information admirably clearly. The
standard view color- codes each transaction to show whether they’re expenses or
income, and when you click on a transaction, it expands to show the category
assigned to it alongside editing options. Even smarter is the ability to
filter the view, either by entering a search term so only transactions
matching that term are displayed, or using the Filter button above the window
so it only shows transactions matching a certain period, or type or status.
MoneyWiz – personal finance for iPhone, iPad and Mac
MoneyWiz supports multiple currencies, and tracks multiple
savings, credit and currents accounts. You add transactions by clicking the
small + arrow at the bottom of the window, and choosing whether it’s an
expense, income or a transfer between accounts. In a pop-up window, you then
enter the details, including a category and account - transactions can be split
between more than one of each - and payee. You can also add an image to each
transaction. This doesn’t at first appear as useful on the Mac as it would be
on a camera-enabled iOS device, but you can attach PDFs to transactions, too,
so it’s still a valuable way to track receipts.
Transactions are clearly flagged as income or expenses and when you add a
newtransactions, MoneyWiz suggests choices as you type
You can import data downloaded from an online bank in OFX,
QFX and QIF formats. Importing data was smooth, but adding transactions in bulk
is more work than it might be. We couldn’t automatically tag similar
transactions and allocate them to the same category as they were imported. This
weakness extends throughout the app: MoneyWiz isn’t smart about automatically
categorising new transactions to match existing ones, but you can at least
allocate multiple transactions to a single category by switching to list view,
filtering to catch all matching transactions and then right- clicking to
allocate them to a category.
Budgeting is flexible: you can create as many as you want to
track specific categories and these are monitored in the background. If you
enter a transaction assigned to a category that’s being monitored, the
available funds in the matching budget change accordingly.
It has a superb approach to scheduled transactions. These
appear in an iCal-like Calendar view so you clearly see upcoming transactions,
and MoneyWiz will remind you when they’re due.
The outstanding feature of MoneyWiz is its syncing engine,
which shares data with versions for iPhone and iPad (you need to buy these
separately). It’s one of the smoothest syncing implementations we’ve seen. Once
you’ve registered for the service and entered the password on each device, the
data syncs automatically until you log out. The only question is one of
security. While you can set up a password lock to prevent access to your
program, sharing data on a syncing server may not be for everyone.
Good-looking and easy to use, MoneyWiz is excellent value
for those who want to track budgets and manage expenses.
“You can see upcoming transactions in the iCal-like Calendar
view, and MoneyWiz will remind you when they're due”
|
Details
|
|
Price
|
$28 inc VAT * iPad $5 * iPhone $5
|
|
From
|
Mac App Store
|
|
Info
|
silverwiz.com
|
|
Needs
|
OS X 10.6 or later
|
|
Pro
|
Looks great * intuitive * excellent syncing
|
|
Con
|
Doesn’t automatically categorise new transactions
|
|
Rates
|
4/5
|
