Hi everyone , anybody willing to share the good , bad and even ugly on Finances 2, on all platforms, iPhone, iPad and Mac. I think I need it on all 3 at the moment. How well do all 3 sync for example and is it reliable? thanks guys
I’ve been using it for years and it’s been solid for me. I did a video about it at ScreenCastsOnline which you might find interesting (though it does need an SCO membership to view).
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I’ve been using it on my iPad and iPhone for just more than a year, just to keep track of my personal accounts and expenses. There’s a slightly higher barrier to entry than other finance trackers. But once you get your head around this double entry accounting, it becomes intuitive to use. It has all features I expect from an local finance tracker. The entry and search are fast. The various report exports are very useful for archiving and reconciliation with bank statements. Overall it works very well and the syncing has been very reliable. It’s a good solution without subscription costs.
The only downside is that it’s not in active development, and the developer is slow to non-responsive to questions. For example, I asked him what the grey number under a composite transaction means, as that number didn’t make any sense to me. I emailed and tweeted to him multiple times, but I never got any response, even though he’s active answering questions about his other apps.
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Many Thanks, very useful
Thanks for the info, lack of development and support is worrying though. I’m on the trial just now but it seems to working very well. Did you ever find out the answer to your question?
That’s interesting. I’ve never had a problem getting an answer, I do always email and to be fair, I also beta test other applications. Though I also found the online documentation is superb, which is often not the case with these more complex apps.
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Nope. I tried asking another user here but he didn’t know either. It remains a mystery to me this day,
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The documentation is sure superior, and the website looks very Apple-ish.
I always preferred email. I only tweeted at him when there was no response. I always report bugs to him with detailed steps plus audio and video clips. I rarely get response but the critical ones are usually fixed in a few months.
As for my question on that number, he did respond to me briefly in email but didn’t answer my question, nor my follow-ups. I’m guessing he either didn’t know the answer, or he got annoyed by me repeatedly emailing him about the same question. But it could be totally trivial and I’m just being stupid. Here’s a screenshot of the messages I sent to him.
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Started a trial with Finances 2 on all platforms and first impressions are good and the sync with iCloud is very fast. I believe there is a special pricing if you purchase all 3 versions, not sure how to get it yet, maybe they will let me know when trial ends. There a couple of iOS only apps which are getting good reviews, spend slack and nuget, but feel I still need a mac version just now. Thanks everyone for your contributions.
sorry spelling mistakes on the two apps , you just have to love predictive text Don’t you lol
I didn’t even notice the typos until you say it. Lol.
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Hi Rose, has the greyed out transactions for future dates and therefore giving an inaccurate balance , given you any problems, and is there any way to get around this problem. Otherwise Finances 2 looks quite good. Thanks
The developer (Matthias Hochgatterer ) responds to easy problems quite quickly, but may never engage to resolve complex issues!
I have ongoing problems with the iCloud sync. I get “Could not find object for reference transaction” errors attempting to sync to any device. I’ve cleared iCloud data and re-installed the app to get around this problem in the past, but this time that hasn’t worked.
I’ve looked at the app logs and I suspect that there is some issue with one of more transaction attachments, but there is no way of determining which one(s), and there has been absolutely no response from the developer! The software needs a validation utility to identify data issues. The logs suggest to me that having detected “atomic zone” errors (whatever that means) that the sync process just stops working!
I now have a functioning app on my Mac but am unable to sync it to any other device.
I have various issues with the basic functionality of the product (eg no account reconciliation process and no ability to attach account documents (eg statements)), but was willing to struggle on without these. The syncing issue may however be the nail in the coffin! I suspect this is a single-person company with very limited resources.
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I experienced a sync issue once last week my iOS, saying “invalid transaction” when a perfectly valid one. I ended up fixing it by deleting the entry and add it again. I’ve been hunting periodically for alternatives as the dev explicitly said there’s nothing major going on for the app.
I guess this app just doesn’t make much money for him to support. Unfortunately there’re not so many alternatives without much higher, often recurring, costs.
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