HyperMoney

This article is a stub requiring substantial initial content from Woozle. Although you may be able to help expand it, it is more likely that Woozle will have to finish setting up the initial content before it will make sense to anyone else. Woozle: Projects: HyperMoney

HyperMoney is my attempt to write a money-management program (as in Quicken or Microsoft Money) that is actually usable and has no Stupid Features. It will be Open Source, as soon as I have source worth publishing (as of 2005-08-06, it's all written in Microsoft Access 97). The next step may be to convert it to web-based application, as HTML could possibly overcome many of the interface design issues I'm encountering.

Project Goals

The two major contenders in this niche -- Quicken and Microsoft Money (Q/MM) -- seem to approach the problem more or less the same way. In areas where either of them fall short, the other one does too.

Reconciling Balances

The main problem that keeps coming up with Q/MM is in reconciling your accounting with the bank's. They take the following approach, with the assumption that you are working from a periodical bank statement:

1. You enter the beginning and ending dates of the bank statement
2. You enter the beginning balance of the bank statement
3. For each item shown on the bank statement, you check off the corresponding item in Q/MM -- or enter it, if Q/MM does not have a record of it
4. You cross your fingers and hope that Q/MM's ending balance matches what the bank shows

One problem is with the final step. If there's a discrepancy, how do you figure out where it occurred? You have two numbers that differ by some arbitrary amount. It could be a missing transaction, or it could be a typo. It could have occurred on any transaction between the starting and ending dates.

Most bank statements (printed ones, at least, and some online banking services do as well) will show you a day-to-day running balance.

Q/MM will show you the same thing, but it shows them in the order of the dates you entered for each transaction. This means, for example, that if you buy something with your credit card on June 1 but the bank shows it as June 5, your balance will disagree with the bank's from June 1 to June 5. If you made another purchase on June 4 and it didn't show up on your bank account until June 8, then you have a discrepancy from June 1 through June 8. If you make purchases every few days of a month, then your balance and the bank's will never agree.

Yes, it's possible that the transactions might still come in in the same order -- but there are inevitably other transactions, such as deposits, with differing lags. And let's not even talk about checks -- you write one to someone on June 2, but they forget to deposit it until July 1, when they go to the bank to deposit their paycheck. That throws you off for an entire month with just one transaction.

The whole problem would be solved, however, if Q/MM would let you also enter the date on which the bank shows the transaction, and then sorted by that date when calculating the balance. Q/MM's balance and the bank's would match line-for-line, unless there was an actual discrepancy -- and then you would know exactly where the discrepancy was.

Links

• http://braincore.blogspot.com/2005/05/koding-what-am-i-koding-then.html - A Dutch developer discusses accounting software, briefly. Apparently they don't use checkbooks in Holland.