Tom Edelson: Tom Edelson on Personal Finance Software

Anybody Want to Test-drive a Moneydance Extension?

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:55:58 GMT

I closed the last post by predicting that my software page was going to grow. Well, technically, it hasn't; it's gotten smaller. But that's because its previous content (a general description of my recent software projects) has been moved to a new location: http://www.well.com/user/edelsont/software/as-developer.html.

The new content at the old location is more of an index to my software-related pages: three of them, so far.

Which brings me to my main point: the newest of these pages describes a Moneydance extension I've written. Yes, after talking a lot about extensions I planned to write, I've finally got one working. It's called "Security Price Entry", and its purpose is to make it easier to record the prices of your stocks, bonds, and/or mutual funds from your broker's monthly statements.

The description of it can be found here: http://www.well.com/user/edelsont/software/moneydance/my-extensions/security-price-entry.html.

Now the bad news: it isn't ready for general distribution yet. Actually, I'm hoping to find a beta tester or two.

The ideal beta tester would be another developer of Moneydance extensions. But any Moneydance user who's interested in such a capability should be able to take it for a spin, if I send it to you in pre-built form.

Categorie(s) for this post: Personal Finance Software.

News flash: schemers may have to wait for Beany

Mon, 21 May 2007 20:20:13 GMT

In my April 23 post, I said that I intended to write a Moneydance extension which would make Moneydance scriptable from [one of the Java implementations of] Scheme. I'd still like to do that, but have tentatively decided that that will not be the first Moneydance extension that I will loose upon the world. The first one will still be a scripting interface, but for a different scripting language: BeanShell.

So what's Beanshell? The really short answer is that BeanShell is interpreted, simplified Java. "Simplified" in several senses; one is that declaring the types of your variables is optional in BeanShell. Also, BeanShell can be run in a "console" mode in which you type a single BeanShell statement, and it is executed immediately.

A BeanShell call to a Java method looks exactly like a Java call to the same method. Behind the scenes, the BeanShell interpreter uses the Java "reflection" API to invoke the method.

This means that, while you can use BeanShell to write and run what we ordinarily think of as "scripts", you can also use it as a learning tool. If the Javadoc for an API doesn't make it crystal clear just how to write that method call that you need, a little experimentation can usually clear it up. You can do that experimentation in Java, of course, but doing it in BeanShell tends to be considerably faster.

Now actually, the same ability to experiment quickly with a Java API is also present in at least one of the Scheme implementations: namely, JScheme. The difference is that, in order to use JScheme in that manner, you have to know how to program in Scheme, and also know a good bit about Java: at least enough to read Javadoc. It's a pretty good bet that more people, today, know Java than know Scheme, but it's a dead solid cinch that more people know Java than know both. (Perhaps you've never heard of BeanShell before, but if you know Java, then I've already told you nearly everything you need to know in order to get started in using BeanShell to explore an API.)

So there's the major reason for the change in plans: the BeanShell scripting interface has a bigger potential user base than a Scheme scripting interface does. In particular, the BeanShell scripting interface should be useful to anyone engaged in learning the Moneydance API, in order to write their own Moneydance extension(s). It might even encourage more people to do so.

The plan is, as I said, "tentative". Why? Mostly because I'd probably abandon it, if I found out that someone else was already working on the same thing, and had a big head start. That consideration is part of the reason for this vaporware announcement; I'm hoping to get the word out such that, if my undertaking it would indeed be a duplication of effort, I'll find out.

I suppose I'd also reconsider the change of plan if this posting led to a great clamor of demand for me to implement a Scheme-Moneydance scripting interface as soon as possible. Or, for that matter, if it resulted in squadrons of pigs flying around my house at all hours.

Categorie(s) for this post include: Personal Finance Software; Java.

Moneydance donating today's proceeds to charity

Wed, 02 May 2007 19:25:01 GMT

From today's entry in the Moneydance blog (written by the man who owns the company, and wrote most of the program): "All of the proceeds from every Moneydance purchase today [Wednesday, May 2, 2007] will be donated to the Virginia Tech Memorial Fund in order to help defray costs for the victims and their families."

I don't know how likely it is that any of my readers will see this soon enough to take advantage of it, but it's another indication of how much more human small businesses can be, and this one is; can you imagine a big outfit like Intuit doing this?

Categorie(s) for this post: Personal Finance Software.

More on Moneydance Extensions

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 20:25:36 GMT

One of the ten Moneydance extensions currently available is called the "Python Scripting Interface". I don't know Python, so I haven't downloaded that extension. I more-or-less assume, though, that if you install it, you then have access, from Python code, to the full Moneydance API: can then do anything from a Python script that you could do directly from a full-fledged extension, written in Java.

And, I'd further assume, you could do it with less effort than would be involved in writing an extension: some of the overhead, setting up your access to Moneydance data, would already have been done for you. Thus, I'd expect that if you wanted to automate some Moneydance chore for your own use, and weren't thinking of distributing the code you create to others, then it would be easier to do it in Python than in Java.

Provided, of course, that you knew Python. As I mentioned, I don't ... and it really doesn't have a place on any list of languages I want to learn, either. (Before a horde of Python fanatics descends upon me, let me hasten to add that I really have nothing against Python; it's just that there are various other languages which, for one reason or another, excite me more ... enough of them for one lifetime, I think. I don't claim that this preference is anything but arbitrary, OK?)

If you have some other scripting language that you'd like to be able to use with Moneydance (at least, if it's a scripting language that's been implemented in Java), you can write your own "scripting interface" in the form of a new extension, and grant your own wish. (Uh, that's provided that you also know some Java, of course.)

As a matter of fact, that's exactly what I have in mind: to write a Moneydance "scripting interface" for one of the Java implementations of Scheme ... of which, you may or may not be surprised to know, there are at least three.

Categorie(s) for this post: Personal Finance Software; Scheme.

Moneydance 2007 available

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 18:27:22 GMT

The 2007 version of Moneydance was released on Friday, January 19, 2007. Here's a link to the announcement, on the company's blog: http://moneydance.com/blog/archives/12.

In response to a comment in that blog entry, the company spokesman gave the current pricing policy for upgrades: "The upgrade to MD 2007 from 2006 (and 2005) is free. Users who purchased Moneydance before 1/1/2004 can purchase MD2007 for half price ($14.99) by entering their license key in the purchase page (http://moneydance.com/purchase)".

Categorie(s) for this post: Personal Finance Software.

Do the Moneydance

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:58:25 GMT

In the entry for March 27, I made a passing mention of Moneydance, the personal finance software package which I currently use. So now I'll say a little more about it.

Moneydance may be considered a competitor to Quicken and Microsoft Money, though it comes from a much smaller company. Moneydance costs about $30, or about the same as the "basic" version of Quicken. (You can try Moneydance out for free, though; it's available for download at http://www.moneydance.com.)

Unlike Quicken and Microsoft Money, Moneydance is written in Java. One implication of this is that it has the same functionality on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Quicken, by contrast, is a much less capable package on a Mac than it is on Windows, and isn't available at all on Linux.

Moneydance isn't "open source", but it does have an open API (Application Program Interface), which allows any Java programmer to write extensions to Moneydance. It may seem as if this is not important to you if you are not a programmer, but I think it is important to anyone, as an indication that the makers of Moneydance have a much more open attitude than do Intuit, the makers of Quicken.

Besides, there are already some extensions available: ten of them, as of today, and they're free. (The online list of available extensions lists only three of them; the only way I know of to get a complete list is from within Moneydance itself. One negative note: when you do that, you get only the names, no descriptions, which makes it hard to tell which one, if any, has the functionality you are looking for.)

This extensibility is one of many reasons why I greatly prefer Moneydance to Quicken. Caveat: this is not a formal review, because I've never done a head-to-head comparison of the same version of the two packages -- that is, of versions released at about the same time -- but I would be very suprised if doing such a head-to-head comparison were to change my preference.

As for Microsoft Money, it's not available on any platform except Windows. Other than that, I know little about it: I've never used it.

Disclosure: a project I have done some work on, and hope to get back to, is to create another Moneydance extension. I don't expect to make any money from doing this (at least, not directly ... ); you decide whether this involvement with the product nevertheless makes me "biased" in evaluating the merits of Moneydance versus its competitors.

I don't speak Marketing: it's not my style to drown you in superlatives. In my judgment, though, Moneydance is the best personal finance program now available. I'd say that's true for most users, and most especially for Macintosh users.

Categorie(s) for this post: Personal Finance Software.

Using TaxACT Online -- one gotcha

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:20:18 GMT

Let me tell you about the biggest annoyance I found while using the Web-based service, "TaxACT Online", to prepare my 2006 income tax returns. There are two reasons for telling you this:

Since I consider this the worst problem I encountered, my recounting it will allow you to judge for yourself what my calling their service "relatively painless" really means.

If you choose to use them, and you run across the same problem yourself, knowing about it in advance will help you to work around it.

The problem was that it was harder than it should have been to paste information into their software from other applications; for example, from Moneydance, the personal finance package that I use.

I do almost all my computing on a Macintosh these days, and that includes preparing my taxes. I regret that I don't know whether Windows users would have the same problem or not.

Also, I use Firefox (currently, version 1.5.0.11). TaxACT does list "Firefox 1.0 and higher" among the browsers they support on the Mac -- you can find the full list on their "system requirements" page, [currently] at

https://www.taxactonline.com/s_online_tax2006/introduction/requirements.asp

-- but still, I can't say for sure whether you're likely to have the problem, unless you're using the same browser.

At any rate: on other sites, I can paste into a text entry field, in Firefox, the same way I would in most other Mac applications: by pressing Command-V. That even works in other parts of TaxACT Online's site. It just doesn't work during what they call the "Q & A": the part of the site where you're actually entering information that will go into your tax return.

After a while, it occurred to me to try another way of pasting information into TaxACT's "Q & A". Namely, I right-clicked within the text field where I wanted to paste the information. (If I'd been using a traditional, one-button Macintosh mouse, I'd have needed to Control-click, instead.) And what do you know, that worked: it gave me a pop-up menu that included "Paste", and selecting that menu item gave me what I wanted: it pasted whatever was in my Mac's Clipboard into the data entry field.

I only wish I'd thought of trying that sooner. I wasted a good chunk of time: both in actually retyping information, and in double- and triple-checking to make sure I'd done so correctly. (I trust the accuracy of Paste a good deal more than I trust my own typing.)

So now, if you decide to use TaxACT Online (I do recommend them), and you encounter this particular data entry problem, you'll know how to work around it, and you won't waste as much time as I did.

Categorie(s) for this post: Personal Finance Software.

TaxACT Online -- a relatively painless way of doing your taxes

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 22:33:44 GMT

I actually got my income tax returns filed, federal and state, later the same day that I made that last post.

As usual, it wasn't really that big of a deal. In retrospect, now that it's done, part of me has trouble relating to how "painful" it felt while I was doing it. However, it's not the first time that has happened, and I know I'm not the only person who has had that experience.

It's an interesting question, really: why do many people have a sense of dread about "doing the taxes", even if their rational minds know that it's never (well, hardly ever) as terrible an experience as anticipation paints it to be? But I'm not going to try to answer that, at the moment.

Instead, I thought I'd mention that for the second year running, I used TaxACT Online -- a Web-based service that can be found at https://www.taxactonline.com -- and that they probably deserve some of the credit. In the past, I've used TurboTax and TaxCut (as programs installed on a Windows PC), and one other Web-based service, CompleteTax. TaxACT certainly isn't perfect, but, for what it's worth, it's the first one that hasn't left me saying to myself "I really should keep looking: there's got to be something better out there."

By the way, just for the record, I don't work for them, nor have any other connection with them, other than being a (relatively) satisfied customer.

Categorie(s) for this post: Personal Finance Software.

Probably can't expect any sympathy, but ...

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:37:02 GMT

I am hip-deep in the nearly-universal annual ritual of "doing my taxes". Nearly universal for Americans, at any rate. On the off chance that someone reading this doesn't know, this refers to preparing an income tax "return" for 2006. Like most states, North Carolina has a state income tax, so I have to do a separate return for that, as well.

I'm expecting a big refund, so I have a practical motivation to get this finished. It's remarkable -- though not surprising -- how painful the process feels, nonetheless.