SansPoint

Cha-Ching!

Cha-Ching iconI have big plans for the near future… well, medium-sized plans… a plan: I’m getting an apartment, or renting a house (with friends). Of course, houses and apartments things cost money, and money is one thing every college student lacks. I’ve been trying to mind and manage my money, and I’ve been putting my trust into a system that forces me to keep track of what goes in and what comes out. Enter Cha-Ching!

Until Cha-Ching, I’ve never used a finance application, except for TurboTax. This is a very new experience for me. Fortunately, Cha-Ching has a very, simple, Apple-style interface with a very shallow learning curve. It can keep track of my checking account (bills, walking-around money, and the like), savings (taxes, apartment fund), credit card (textbooks, textbooks, textbooks!), and online accounts such as PayPal. You can use it to set up budgets – though I haven’t tried this yet. I’m mostly keeping track of my stupid spending habits for now.

One major feature is the ability to tag, and make smart folders for your transactions. I have two smart folders, currently. One I use for keeping track of debit card transactions, which I do a lot of, and another for things I’ve tagged as “stupid” which are things that I really should not be spending my money on. Fortunately, I’ve only had three “stupid” transactions since I started keeping track at the start of the month. There’s also a good number of just plain stupidly fun features, such as being able to attach pictures of your purchases, even capturing them from your iSight camera… if only I had one[1], and accessing your account websites through the application[2]. It can also sync financial data to an iPod, though I really don’t see the utility for that just yet, and share financial data between networked Macs using Bonjour.

For a beta app, there’s a lot of spitshine and polish, though some things could still stand to be cleaned up a bit. Setting up a new account, or making an account transfer causes the main window to go translucent for no good reason. The new transaction panel has options for photo taking and file attachment in tabs, which I didn’t even notice until I started this review[3]. Also, while the shrinking down of the window to a “Locked” dialog box is neat for the security-minded, the animation is pretty slow and jerky on my G4 mini. Most of the animation effects, however, can be turned off in the preferences.

Honestly, Cha-Ching is astounding, and the only real hiccup in using it was waiting for my registration number to come by e-mail. The beta price, $14.95, is a steal, especially factoring in free upgrades until it hits 2.0. It’s a lot cheaper than Quicken by a long shot, and cheaper than iBank, too.[4] If you need a dead simple finance app for the Mac, Cha-Ching is perfect.


  1. A donation jar to help me get a 24″ iMac Core 2 Duo will be posted on the site sometime before the last trump ↩
  2. I always prefer stand-alone browsers for this, however. ↩
  3. The develpers should at least add an “add file” box to the main tab of the panel. I could finally dump my web receipts out of Yojimbo. ↩
  4. Though it’s a bit less feature rich ↩

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