View this article at: http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/02/12/first.look.splashmoney/
Tuesday, February 12,2008 @ 10:00pm
Tuesday, February 12,2008 @ 10:00pm
First Look: SplashMoney finance manager
When it seems like you're broke no matter how much money you bring in, it might be a good idea to start tracking your financial transactions. Unfortunately, this simple task can appear needlessly complicated by many financial managing programs that overwhelm you with too many features. To make it easy to control your finances, SplashData made SplashMoney, a simple financial management program that helps you record your income and expenses, create budgets, while making reports and charts of your spending habits.
To get started, SplashMoney helps you create one or more accounts to track your credit card expenses, checking account balance, or cash balance. Each time you spend money, record the amount, the class (such as Business or Personal), and the category (such as from your checking or savings account).
If you have financial data stored in another program, such as Quicken or Excel, SplashMoney can import (and export) both QIF (Quicken Interchange Format) and CSV (Comma Separated Value) files. If you do your banking online, SplashMoney can connect to any bank that also works with Quicken, so you can maintain accurate records of all your accounts. One unique feature of SplashMoney is its ability to record different types of currencies such as American and Euro dollars, enhancing its usability for international accounts.
Staring at rows and columns of financial transactions can be hard to understand. To simplify presentation, SplashMoney can create simple charts to help you visualize what your data means. You can customize every chart and drill-down your data. For example, if a pie chart shows that medical expenses make up 14 percent of your annual budget, double-clicking on the medical expenses portion of a chart lets you see a list of all medical expenses for that time period.
To protect your data, SplashMoney can password protect and encrypt your files using the Blowfish encryption algorithm, which is considered one of the more secure encryption methods in the world.
With a modest $19.95 price and emphasis on simplicity, SplashMoney can help anyone track, manage, and plan their financial present and future. SplashMoney’s low-cost and ease of use makes this program useful for managing money without the complexity found in most financial managment applications.