[edit: unlocked b/c round one is over and I didn't make it; maybe someone will take the ideas and make this anyhow?]
Yesterday I entered
My Dream App, a contest to propose a new Macintosh application, judged according to its novelty, use of Mac OS features, feasibility, and marketability. Three winners will get to see their applications developed
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Comments 37
I've never really understood the point of programs like Quicken. I don't have a problem keeping track of how much money I have, or where I spent it; I buy basically everything with a credit card, and I can download my transaction history at will -- ditto with checks. The credit card also buffers money, so my exact account balance at any particular moment isn't ever really important.
The thing that would be really useful would be to have all the purchases categorized, so I can see how much total I've spent on, say, groceries. And from what I can tell, that's something you have to do by hand, on top of entering all the data, and it's a gigantic amount of work, which is why I never do it.
Could this program help with that kind of thing?
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Quicken is vaguely helpful for us because we keep quasi-separate finances (we have his, his and ours accounts), and I often pay for things that are household expenses in cash (mostly food: farmers' market visits, ethnic grocery store visits, ...) or via my own credit card.
My biggest issue with all things Quicken-like is that at the end of the day, I more or less know what I already did know, which is what my online bank balance was so kind as to tell me: I have about $X. It always feels like a huge payout for little payoff. (On the other hand, it's vaguely cool when da_lj tells me how much money we spend on things I didn't know we spent money on. And then I forget...)
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I'd never do anything with reciepts, but smart categorization would be awesome. Is that an area where you could harness the power of user contributions? Like, suppose you can export a file (suitably anonymized and sanitized) that listed a bunch of vendors that fell into some useful category, and share it with other people. Sort of like Flickr tagging. Could I have most of my vendor categorization done automatically by relying on categories that other users have published?
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I'm not sure I like 'Ka-Ching'. At least it's onomatopoeic.
How 'bout 'Reggie' short for 'Register'? :)
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Maybe it can be in the release notes, complete with graphics of old-school, filled-out registers. I could probably dig some up for that from my dirt-poor college days.
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I had a 4am thought: this program itself could handle non-money items just as well. Make it transparently easy to add new "denominations" and shazam, if your "friends" category includes a transaction with the denomination "beer"... you can mark that you owe Dave a beer.
[The problem with email transactions is authentication; I expect billmonk will run into this as well, people forging the "from" and inserting bad URLs. This program can possibly get around that with SPF to validate the domain, in ( ... )
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I would totally use this kind of thing. Anyone who does budgeting and tracking of detailed expenses or is managing property or runs a small business could use this.
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I would totally use this kind of thing.
Cool.
Anyone who does budgeting and tracking of detailed expenses or is managing property or runs a small business could use this.
That's the impression I want to give in the project description- it's for all of us. There's no difference between small-business and household, as far as the programming goes. (Just category names!)
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However, if you ever decide to pursue this on your own, I'd be interested in contributing effort toward it. I offer expertise in testing, SQL, and PHP, plus I have a low flake factor. I wouldn't say my life's dream is to come up with a secure, customizable personal finance tool, but it'd be an interesting project.
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I like Delicious Library a lot, I downloaded it just to play with the iSight scanner thingy. I decided my time was better spent on other things than making a (very pretty) db of all our books. But yeah, it was one of my inspirations when I was thinking about this.
It would totally kick ass if machine-readable receipts were bar-coded so we didn't have to muck around with OCR.
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