Let me get this out of the way right now: I haven’t balanced my checkbook … ever.

However, recently after entering the stage of “real life” I thought it might be beneficial to start: budgeting my finances, tracking my credit cards, and generally trying to not get myself into horrendous debt. After coming to this conclusion I started looking for realistic ways to track my finances. Particularly ways that would take as little effort as possible.

Now, there is good news for someone in my shoes. First, there are about 10,000 programs available to do finances on the computer. Some are web based and some require a software installation. However, I have yet to find an online based finance tracking system (such as Mint) that doesn’t scare the hell out of me. This is because they require you to enter in all of your online banking information, including: usernames, passwords, account numbers, and bank security questions (i.e. an identity theft’s wet dream). Okay, so online money budgeting (as of now) is out of the question.

That leaves me to the software side of things, here’s my ideal goal for such a piece of software:

• Fast transaction entering. Preferalbly the ability to pull it from the web, but otherwise accept transaction importing via QIF or CSV files.
• Tagging. A must for working with purchases that belong in multiple categories (i.e. a dinner might be classified as: entertainment, drinking, a gift, and food).
• Fast searching. I don’t want to scroll through thousands of transactions to find what I did on January 10th, let me see that instantly.
• Bill tracking. I need to know what bills I have coming up and how much they are. Preferably I would like to have reminders that take me directly to an online payment site.
• Quick budgets. It’s nice to see a three month graph of my spending, but what if I want to see individual transactions and how I am stacking up for the current month’s budget? I should have this option.
• Security. I want to make sure only I can work with my finances.
• Usability! If the app is slow, the keyboard short cuts suck, or things are hard to find, I won’t ever use it. This app has to be easier to use than my iPod.

After doing a bit of research I came to the conclusion that there are no apps that do everything I want (particularly the online transaction gathering). However, there is one that comes damn close: Cha Ching. Cha Ching is a $40 app that is exactly what you would expect from a group of indie OS X developers. It is simple and intuitive. The application itself is just what I need, something that I can import transactions into and spend less than 5 minutes using per week. It does tagging that is inexplicably easy, not to mention it allows organization via smart folders. Meaning I can create dynamic (self-updated) groups of transactions based on price, tag, date, name, etc. What this means is that within seconds I can know exactly how much I have spent on gas for the month, or just how many transactions have taken place with the word “liquor” (hey! it’s just an example) in the title.

There is room for improvement with Cha Ching. For instance, it’d be awesome to be able to put a web address for online bill payment into each reoccurring bill reminder. Further, global search could work a bit better. Not to mention a find and replace function for transactions (imagine doing a find for the title “diamond shamrock” and globally applying the “gas” tag to it). Still, that said I am extremely impressed with Cha Ching and I hope it will be the answer to my finance tracking. I’ll check back in a few months and let you know how things are going.