Now that I’ve got my data imported into iBank, it’s time to actually put it through its paces on my easiest set of financial data (the household accounts).<\/p>\n
The UI is a single window. \u00a0I’ve never thought myself a fan of Quicken’s windows-everywhere approach, but I’m not sure if I like the single window either. \u00a0My household account list has 10 accounts in it, which takes up the majority of the space available. \u00a0I don’t want to lose the summary pane, since that’s where the upcoming scheduled transactions are listed, and I very \u00a0much want to see them at all times. \u00a0I seem to spend a lot of time scrolling through the left navigation pane, and it’s getting on my nerves.<\/p>\n
There’s several other UI annoyances. \u00a0iBank should win a special award for Most Gratuitous Use of Cover Flow. \u00a0I can mostly ignore that, no matter how much it makes me want to snigger. \u00a0The main UI looks like a chequebook register, which is natural, but poor use of spacing and fonts make it difficult to read for any length of time. \u00a0Poor use of fonts also haunts the reporting function.<\/p>\n
Entering data manually seems difficult. \u00a0While the main window looks like a chequebook register, there’s no blank line.\u00a0 You’re forced to either use the “new transaction” button in the bottom bar (not the most discoverable location) or cmd-N.\u00a0 Normally, I like cmd-N for this sort of thing, but it gets annoying if you’ve got a whole account that needs manual entry.\u00a0 I also don’t like that cmd-N creates a new transaction inline wherever you’ve currently got selected instead of at the top or bottom.\u00a0 I kept on creating new transactions before I realized where they were located.<\/p>\n
From years of Quicken, I’m used to hitting the + key to get the date of a transaction to increase by one.\u00a0 Actually, I don’t have to hit the shift key, just hitting = results in this.\u00a0 Muscle memory made me try that, leaving me with = in the date field. \u00a0I know that this is a minor detail, but it’s something that I’ve come to rely on, and the absence of this detail is also annoying.<\/p>\n
I started to add in my scheduled transactions.\u00a0 There are two ways to enter a scheduled transaction.\u00a0 One is to create an instance of a transaction, and then use a menu selection (or contextual menu selection, if you’re so inclined) to create a scheduled transaction from that.\u00a0 When using this option, I didn’t see a confirmation that my scheduled transaction had been saved. It took a couple of minutes of looking around to see that it’s in the summary area, in the lower-left corner of the window (you know, the least discoverable area of the screen).\u00a0 Also, in the left navigation bar, there’s a category called “manage” which has an item “scheduled transactions”.\u00a0 In either case, the confirmation that the scheduled transaction has been created is pretty subtle, which doesn’t make me feel entirely confident in it.\u00a0 On the other hand, creating a new scheduled transaction isn’t something that I do frequently, so perhaps this wouldn’t be so annoying after I’ve got everything set up.<\/p>\n
The other way to do it is in the list of scheduled transactions.\u00a0 That’s in the left navigation bar under the “manage” category, which I only found after I’d been trying to create scheduled transactions via the direct manipulation method and wasn’t seeing the confirmation messages.\u00a0 Adding a scheduled transaction here allows more flexibility than doing so from an existing transaction.\u00a0 Using an existing transaction assumes that you want it on a monthly basis.\u00a0 However, there’s thing missing from the scheduled transactions: the ability to have a flexible amount for the scheduled transaction.\u00a0 For example, my power bill is never the same every month, but it’s always due on the same date.\u00a0 I’ll have to manually update the transaction amount when I actually make it.\u00a0 This isn’t a big deal (after all, I have to make that manual step today), but it feels odd to not be able to specify that the amount isn’t fixed.<\/p>\n
I haven’t figured out the difference between “transaction templates” and “scheduled transactions”.\u00a0 Or, rather, I haven’t figured out why both of them exist in the UI.\u00a0 In fact, I don’t get most of what’s in the left-hand navigation bar.<\/p>\n
After I got my new transactions entered, it was time to reconcile. \u00a0On my first attempt at reconciling a bank statement, I discovered that I had to reconcile all<\/em> of my old transactions. \u00a0All of my imported information doesn’t have the reconciliation information.\u00a0 This made reconciling last month’s statement impossible. \u00a0On the one account that I tried, I didn’t want to have to go through all six years of statements and do them individually, so I tried to choose all of the old transactions.\u00a0 I had to click through six bloody years of transactions individually.\u00a0 And then the numbers didn’t match up, so it was a bloody half-hour of wasted effort.\u00a0 I deleted the statement, and the account is still unreconciled.<\/p>\n More research told me that I was going to have to go through all of the statements to do this to make sure that all of the individual transactions imported properly.\u00a0 You can imagine the amount of obscenities that I started spewing at this point.\u00a0 I’ve only got six years of data on this one, and the idea of having to go through all of my bank statements for that period of time is making my skin crawl.\u00a0 This might be a dealbreaker for using iBank.<\/p>\n Although I was pretty upset at the idea of having to go back and reconcile all eleventy billion transactions manually, I also tried to set up a budget. \u00a0In doing so, this made me realize that I need to invest time into fixing my categories. \u00a0It correctly imported the names of all of my categories, but set them as expenses. \u00a0That took a couple of minutes to fix, and then I went through the budget wizard to get started. \u00a0Most of it was self-explanatory, until I got to the screen titled “starting cash in envelopes”. \u00a0Hunh? \u00a0That sent me to the manual to learn that iBank’s budget can use the so-called envelope system of budgeting.<\/p>\n I ended up having to create three budgets to get one that was correct. \u00a0The second screen, “select accounts to budget” tripped me up. \u00a0It gives a list of all of my accounts, and they’re all checked by default. \u00a0The manual is no help, telling me to “[c]heck off the ones you want to include”. \u00a0Well, okay, they’re all part of my financial picture, so I want them included, right? \u00a0Wrong. \u00a0One of my accounts tracks my mortgage. \u00a0If I want to be able to include my monthly mortgage payment in my budget, I have to remove<\/em> my mortgage account from the list of accounts. \u00a0Mortgage interest is already included, since it’s got a category, but I can’t capture this payment to my mortgage if I list it as an account to include in my budget. \u00a0Conceptually, I can’t grasp this at all.<\/p>\n I set up my budget as an annual budget. \u00a0While most of my transactions are monthly, there are some important ones that are biannual or annual. \u00a0My car insurance and property tax payments are biannual, for example. \u00a0However, this means that the only view that I get of my mortgage is of the year. \u00a0This makes it hard to see if I’ve met my budget for, say, my power bill this month. \u00a0I can only get the picture of my year-to-date, not this month.<\/p>\n Issues in setting up my budget aside, I don’t like how it shows my budget information. \u00a0The visual display of the information is poorly-done. \u00a0There’s a progress bar for each individual expense category, which has five states: empty (no transactions), green (on track), yellow (ahead of forecast, but still under budget), red (over budget), and a checkmark (exactly at the budget). \u00a0It’s difficult to read a line and see what’s going on. \u00a0Overall, viewing my budget and figuring out what’s going on is something that I can’t do in the budget view. \u00a0I’d hoped that I could create a report, but there only seem to be four built-in reports that I can’t do anything with.<\/p>\n I’ve spent three weeks using iBank seriously, and I end up with a headache each time I try to use it. \u00a0I don’t mean that in an “ugh, this thing sucks” kind of way, I mean that my head physically aches after using it. \u00a0Some of it is simply trying to get up and running, some of it is trying to figure out what they’re conceptually doing (the budget thing is entirely perplexing), and some of it is poor visual choices.<\/p>\n After three weeks, I just don’t see how I can use this seriously. \u00a0There’s the major hump to get over of having to reconcile all of my accounts for all of their transactions. \u00a0I don’t even want to imagine what that time investment is like. \u00a0Additionally, the childish budget design and difficulty of using scheduled transactions make it unsuitable for my needs in planning.<\/p>\n This is part four of an ongoing series about trying to move away from Quicken 2007 for Mac. \u00a0The previous three parts of the series are here:<\/em><\/p>\n Now that I’ve got my data imported into iBank, it’s time to actually put it through its paces on my easiest set of financial data (the household accounts). The UI is a single window. \u00a0I’ve never thought myself a fan of Quicken’s windows-everywhere approach, but I’m not sure if I like the single window either. … Continue reading the road away from Quicken, part 4: using iBank<\/span> Creating a budget<\/h2>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
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