Cha-ching hits 1.2.1

I use Cha-Ching to manage my personal finances, and while it has some annoying bugs, it's pretty useful. I looked at iBank, and it seemed to be way too much at the time. Hopefully Cha-Ching's development will pick back up in the future.

@11: My key, as well, stopped working when that first update hit. I may have gotten lucky, but I sent them a polite e-mail following all their instructions (including a screenshot of the MacHeist loot page) and got a reply within a couple of days.

My key was added to their activation database and it continues to work through the latest 1.2.1 release. Seems like a big blunder happened somewhere that must have been really hard on their tiny development team. I'm more inclined to blame it on MacHeist not transferring the license info correctly or something.

I like Cha-Ching, and I've been running it since the MacHeist beta days.

With it I keep tabs on my checking and savings accounts, enter my transactions nightly, and balance against my QIF-imported bank statements. I will occasionally browse through my transactions by Tags to see any trends in my spending, and I take iSight pics of expensive purchases for insurance purchases. Then I backup the entire database offsite to .Mac.

For me, Cha-Ching does that better than anything else on the Mac. What was I using before Cha-Ching? Quicken 2007 (and earlier) - the most horrid pieces of software I've ever run. I even ran MS Money through VMware Fusion for a time, just because it was one of the better options. For my admittedly simple needs, Cha-Ching is a breath of fresh air, not unlike switching to Mac in the first place.

I tried Moneydance, iBank, Jumsoft Money, and about 5 others before deciding I liked Cha-Ching the best for my needs.

Cha Ching is a turd. Unfortunately, so's everything else in the Mac bookkeeping space. The requirements aren't difficult: import files from your bank, sort them by category and do a modicum of analysis. Cha Ching grenades when you try, as does every other program. I got to the point where I was importing flat files, throwing them into Excel, manipulating the cells by hand, exporting text files and manipulating them with Automator just to get data to read into Cha Ching and that's about when I realized that putting up with Quicken was worth it even if it does crash every fourth transaction.

And that's really the problem, isn't it? None of the startups need to make anything even vaguely functional because Quicken for Mac is such a joke... and Quicken doesn't have to debug the bloatware disaster they sell at Office Depot for $70 because their competition is such a joke.

Cha Ching is exactly what windows people hate about Macs - it's pretty and completely non-functional. If they'd spent half the time on functionality that they'd spent on look, it'd be a killer app.

But they didn't.

Try http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibank/ ... it's pretty good.

Cha-Ching looks nice, but I just can't get it to work for my small business. But Quicken and Quickbooks are outdated, bloated, and look ancient.

I sure wish there was a nice medium somewhere.

Cha-Ching sucks. And unfortunately, I'm almost forced to say, the developers don't seem to care.

You'd expect a money application to be able to deal with multiple notations (i.e. commas instead of dots as decimal separators and spaces or dots instead of commas as digit group separators). I was promised in February or so that this would be fixed, so I bought the beta.

Now, 10 months later, there's still no news on this. Two times I received a reply in the style of "Thanks, we're working on it." I even sent them my .qif file and screenshots.

Never did they cooperate to actually work on fixing this.

So basically, if you live in Europe, or just anywhere where not the U.S.-style notation is used, you're screwed.

U.S. citizens: buy this app (although there are several more bugs). Anybody else: DON'T.

Cha-Ching looked so promising, however I just find the small little issues bug me. Like you can't plan a bill in advance and have it not take out of your account until that day, it takes it out right away. So if you have a bill setup, you'll show a huge negative because it takes it out for all future transactions. I might switch back to quicken or look into iBank.