My Dream App

[da]

[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 commercially, plus they get royalties. In a week, the contest closes to new submissions, and they weed the bids down to 24 semi-finalists. (Go check it out; I'd love to see what my friends come up with as their ideal applications! Plus, I'd love to bounce ideas off everyone, and help come up with something else as your bid!)

The initial bid is limited to 800 characters (eek!) and they're up to over 1,500 submissions in the first 48 hours (eek!!) So
I don't suppose I'll make it to the second round. But who knows.

People who've read my fuming about Quicken on Mac may guess where my thoughts were this week. So sue me, my dream app is... a Quicken-killer. Yah, boring. How many people would use something like this?:

Title: Tweek or Ka-ching. (Maybe something else. I've got a week to decide.) [Edit: how about 'Reggie' short for Register?.. ]

Description:


A modern money-tracking program. We've got email receipts, paypal, bank and card transaction downloads. Checkbooks are 20th century. Automate!

Default interface presents eye-candy for your chosen important items (budgets, recent transactions, balances).

Use spotlight to find emailed receipts. Attach web receipts and web proofs-of-purchase. Download .qif and OFX data. All automatically, & via task scheduler.

One goal: minimize manual entry. OCR paper receipts via scanner/iSight. Automatically reconcile where possible. Learns your behaviour well enough to make money-tracking effortless.

Another goal: use the network. Open scripting API for plugins (IO/storage/control). What if it worked with billmonk.com? What if joint expenses carried to other person's view on their mac?

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(Please don't share this beyond my friends-list; I locked it b/c I don't want someone else to submit the same idea.)

Critiques welcome. After all, I have 12 characters to spare. ;)

Comments

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

'Tweek' is a bad name. It doesn't connote finance, and is likely to be confused with either setup-tweaking or crystal meth.

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?

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I don't really understand much of money management, either.

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...)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Could this program help with that kind of thing?

"Why yes," he said, with a twirl of his cape and a clap of his hands.

The (outmoded) state of the art is to automatically pair up new transactions from the same vendor, to the same category (or categories plural, by percentage, if you've gotten fancy).

Some credit-cards will do this automatically, on their website, for a small number of categories. That's OK.

Or Quicken will do it, using your own set of categories, when you download the transactions; then you correct any that it mis-categorized.

To my mind, Quicken is buggy in that it doesn't learn the vendors very well; it can get completely confused by any novel characters in the downloaded vendor name. I think software should do much better (just from what I know about Bayesian trained spam-filtering, which does a damn sight better than Quicken).

The reports you can generate, in Quicken, are really quite pretty. You can compare actual expenses to budgets, by month, if you're inclined. Or just notice how much you're spending on dog kibble versus movie rentals...

There's another layer, the receipts. I save them from credit-card transactions, because restaurants occasionally like to enter the totals wrong. And often the category is purchase-dependent; such as personal vs. business vs. joint expenses. Currently, this step sucks. I spend at least 30 seconds on each damn receipt.

I think/hope a modern system could OCR your receipts and grab date, vendor, total amount, maybe keywords. But at least reduce from 30 seconds down to 5.

Maybe OCR isn't that great. But if the postal service and British traffic systems can do sub-second captures on noisy data, I should be able to expect my computer to do 5 second captures on, say, the first and last line of a receipt, and maybe more. Shouldn't I? (He said hopefully).

So, in addition to reconciling the downloaded statement to the downloaded total (which is stupid; I've never had more than a 1-cent difference; but that's the sort of reconciling Quicken does most easily) I want to reconcile my receipts against the downloaded statement. Quicken's way of doing that isn't very intelligent either: you have to enter the receipts before you download transactions, because it only makes one attempt at matching them up, at the download stage.

If you download them first, then for each receipt, you have to either sort the paper receipts by date or manually cursor around the checkbook register to see if they're missing. And fix the categories, which is an annoying amount of mousework (more so than entering the transaction in the first place).

If you don't do this religiously and you have a big stack of receipts, this can be a lot of sorting and cursoring.

This is my experience, at least.

Now, dan just sorts paper receipts by purchase category, and adds them up on a sheet of paper. And eyeballs his bank statements. I'm not totally convinced that's not a better solution in the end.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

See, I just throw the reciepts in a box and glance at the credit card bill once a month. But we're also pretty much a single-account household.

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?

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

"Why yes, it could," he said, with a flourish.

But I was thinking about that before, and people are more funny about money than they are about shared photos or bookmarks. All you have to say is "phones home" and you lose a chunk of interested users.

Even as little shared information as, "anonymous user X shops at store Y and calls that category Z." If the data were stockpiled by some random company, I wouldn't necessarily trust that they weren't collecting my shopping patterns, even without pricetags.

Though, there could be a pre-seeded list of stores, and there could be separate options for automatically doing a lookup, and automatiacally submitting new store/categories. (filter out categories marked private?)

Glad you mentioned Flickr tagging. This gets into something else I didn't have space to write in the short form. Tags: why limit to one category like Quicken does? Categories shouldn't be mutually exclusive; a shipping purchase can be personal, joint, business; it could be for a particular project I wanted to track; or all of the above.

Quicken's model is convoluted: there's a "category" (limited to one, though they can be hierarchical and therefore inherited). You can have a "class" which is sort of a second independent category, but not really. Limited to one.

And you can have a "transfer" which means one side is a credit and the other side is a debit. But a transfer can't be categorized, which means you need to mess around with double-entry accounting and set up the other account to be normalized to zero if you want to categorize those transactions. And then, they turn out to be negative. I've tried going the double-entry route for categorizing joint expenses, and damn but it's complicated and annoying.

Hm, I hadn't realized I would vent so much about Quicken categories. Guess you hit a nerve. ;) I don't know any program that does this right, either.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Intuit might be heading in this direction, with a new web-service they started, called zipingo (apparently mostly for rating and finding vendors, which shows up as ratings within Quicken. which is an odd thing to bundle into a checkbook program, but I digress.) It also seems they are going to allow users to categorize vendors on the site, so if they thought of it, they could possibly pick up categories from vendor within quicken.

http://zipingo.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/08/scattegories.html#more

I don't know how far-fetched this is, since the zipingo site seems to be down this morning. Anyway.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

And the name 'Tweek' is now struck from the record. ;)

I'm not sure I like 'Ka-Ching'. At least it's onomatopoeic.

How 'bout 'Reggie' short for 'Register'? :)

[dawn-guy.livejournal.com]

Ka-Ching could work to your advantage, given what I know of Apple employees. I'd be inclined to a more "fun in function" name like BuckTrace or Bank Shot, but I'm not steeped in Apple culture.

It'd be nice to have trends (for budgeting) and exceptions (highlight unusual activity), perhaps at the expense of the "Checkbooks are 20th century" verbiage.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Those are all excellent ideas.

Buck... Bucko.lico.us? (*hork*) (I need a nap).

I dunno much about apple employees, so I'm not sure what advantage I was getting from the name. I do know that the Woz is supposed to be somehow involved with grading the submissions in the contest. (eek!!!)