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 nowâ€, I got a little pop-up telling me that it had been “moved to the Master Vault with pending statusâ€. 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 Vaultâ€. 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?
I wasn’t able to find anything in spotlight either. Maybe I have to re-index. I hope not. That would take forever.
I’ll have to check it out the demo tonight. Definitely something I have use for.
Until I can do my online banking as I do with Quicken (I still use the windows version) I won’t want the extra work to use Cha-Ching. I am anxiously awaiting that feature since I’d love to drop Quicken (and windows).
@ Deb
I thought you can do online banking with Cha-Ching. The website says:
“…Use the online tab to review your transactions side by side with your online banking account from within Cha-Ching. Or simply import your QIF files directly into Cha-Ching…”
@Azwa & Deb
When you set up an account, there is an option to enter in a URL. Though I don’t think you can download transactions off of your banking site… yet anyway…
Nope, no indexing in Spotlight for me either?! (Love to see an integration with Quicksilver). What I realy like in Cha-Ching is the smart folder option. To easy get a total overview of spending on for example ‘Music’ through serveral accounts (was a shocker).
Some small bugs aside, one little great app.
I use cha-ching as my primary finance tool and I love it. I definately think they shouldn’t have called this a 1.0 version. However, the changes have been awesome even though they are a little buggy
Something I would love to see in this app is monthly savings (not a bill). I want to put away $50 dollars a month and never touch it. What way could I do this?
@ Connor Downey
What you could do is set up a separate account from your main one. Then, what you would do is transfer $50 from the main to the new account. You should see a transaction that says “Transfer Deposit (date).” If you click edit for this transaction, you can have it repeat every month.
And as a quick update, MidnightApps has now released Cha-Ching v1.01 and the bugs that I listed above, were listed under things that have been fixed.
[...] Fixed in these versions include: Transactions now appear correctly in Spotlight, the Bill Manager now pays bills correctly, and there were a number of other things addressed. I think that it is safe to say that v1.0 is complete, though more updates may come in the near future. We can now looks forward to the rest of v1, and in the distant future, v2.0. Cha-Ching is shareware and is available for $40 from MidnightApps. Also, remember to check out our full Cha-Ching Review. [...]
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Couldn’t use this app.
Crash all time and I can select nothing
Keep crashing and freezing.
Too bad for me.