Cha-Ching: Money Management Hits 1.0

On Friday, April 20th, MidnightApps released v1.0 of their popular money management application Cha-Ching. With this new version comes a new price tag of $40, and a whole slew of new features. Though v1.0 comes as a major update, I experienced a few problems with it.

1. Spotlight Integration
With Spotlight Integration, you can now search your transactions right from the Spotlight window. Type in a tag or a title, and matching transactions system wide will show up in the results. Unfortunately though, I could not get this feature to work while I was testing. Searching tags and titles turned up no relevant results in the Spotlight window.

2. Bill Manager
Newly added to Cha-Ching is Bills. You can now manage all your bills within Cha-Ching. Setting up a Bill is quite easy. You enter in the date, amount, title and relevant tags and click save. With a smooth flip transition, your Bill is sitting there looking back at you. The problem I had with Bills though, is when I went to pay them. After clicking “Pay selected now”, I got a little pop-up telling me that it had been “moved to the Master Vault with pending status”. Upon opening the Master Vault, the Bill was not there, but still sitting in the Bill Manager.

3. Interface
The interface overhaul on Cha-Ching looks like a great improvement. It is now much easier to see important information at a glance. No longer do you have to go digging for it. The “Paid” and “Pending” drawers have gone in favor of a “Master Vault”. One of my favorite interface additions is Drag and Drop tag editing. Once you bring up the Tag Window, all of your current tags are displayed. To add a tag, all you have to do is drag the tag you want onto the transaction.

4. Over-hauled Budgeting
In previous versions of Cha-Ching, I found it difficult to set up Budgets. In this version however, it is much easier to do. You add the incoming budget items, set the outgoing budget items, and Cha-Ching will give you an overview of your budget. When you add a transaction and tag it with the ones matching your budget, it will update accordingly. A very useful feature.

5. Other Tweaks/Additions
-Cha-Ching no longer counts down and says “Cha-Ching” when taking a picture.
-Cha-Ching icon now has change in the side drawer.
-You can now share folders.
-You can now duplicate transactions.
-Filter transactions in a certain date range.
-Enhanced searching and filtering transactions.
-The ability to transfer funds from one account to another

Even without the newer features working properly, Cha-Ching v1.0 turned out to be a pretty solid update. The interface makes it easy to go about managing my finances (if you can call the pile of change on my table finances…), and the tagging makes it easy to find any transactions that I have entered. Cha-Ching is finally out of beta, and is available for $40 from MidnightApps.

Has anyone else experienced any of the troubles I had?