Thanks! Now I understand.
Thank you for your enthusiasm! It has motivated me to convert several of my current Numbers spreadsheets and Notenik collections to Panorama X databases.
Who knows where I’ll end up, but it will be fun to see if this time I am willing to move forward with the Panorama X app!
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What do home users use databases for? I have never found a use that Excel doesn’t work for just as easily. I would love to use one for personal finance, and I tried to do it in Access, but it was too complicated for me to figure out.
For one thing, Panorama X has a nice form designer for when I don’t want to do data entry in a grid.
Spreadsheets are fragile, often clunky, and their tools limited. I’m hoping I can open some doors and windows into my personal data using a more capable app. But this has been a lifelong search …
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Relational databases are like a more powerful and flexible VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP that connect multiple tables to each other and can’t silently break. Plus you can build an application on top of them easier than updating an XLSX file.
I like it for hobbies, tracking education stuff, the home library.
I’m pretty comfortable with sqlite, Postgresql and Mysql, but a database builder lets other people work on it and keeps me from having to build basic UI on top of the database.
Airtable is the easiest way I know of to play with relational concepts. It’s free for up to 1k rows per database. This Panorama relational update is nice, though, and cheaper and less limited than Airtable once the database starts growing.
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Technically it would be ideal for personal finance, because as I do it currently I have annual workbooks and then manually move totals at the end of the year to historical spreadsheets and then start the process over. A database would save me my annual shuffle (but I do kind of enjoy that part, closing the books on the year) and it would create historical reports on the fly easily. The problem is the learning curve. I had a class on Access years ago, and started to it there, but as I said, it got complicated quickly.
Yes, that’s a good use case! I think you’d pick up the table designing in Access quickly.
Yep, designing the tables is the easy part with my Excel background. Getting them to work together, creating data entry forms, reports, etc. on the other hand…
There are various packages/plugins for Notion and AirTables for this. I need to read more. Anyway, thanks for answering my questions.
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Panorama X is very intuitive. I have had some experience using FileMaker Pro a number of years ago. I started using it immediately. And I am teaching myself as I go. I’ve set up a nice database that is already getting me organized to sell books online. I’m certain that I’ve only scratched the surface and it might be overkill but I LOVE it!
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I don’t see TurboTax in the Mac App Store. I do see it in the iOS Store with a rating of 4.8 (937,000 reviews). I use TurboTax every year on macOS and find it great. I know they keep my data as I use them to eFile my returns; I don’t think their data retention policies are significantly different from any other similar program.
It’s great, until it’s not. I used it for a decade, didn’t love it, but it worked. Saved me having to enter a bunch of stuff. This year it messed up, some bug, I caught it. Spent hours on the phone with their “support”, who was just following a script but couldn’t actually do anything. Scrapped the whole thing and used a different service. Except I had already paid TT. I asked for a refund, could clearly show them the error. They said no. I filed a dispute with my credit card and got my money back.
Never using an Intuit product again. I get that there are always going to be bugs, but their support might as well as been nonexistent. Never mind that Intuit lobbies to keep our tax system horrible.
FreeTaxUSA next year for me. Easily the most highly recommended service I found online.
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Glad it eventually worked out last year.
Hi,
I was reading the actual written reviews but wasn’t paying much attention to the numbers although I should have.
I’m an accountant and we are pushing clients away from Intuit (quickbooks, turbo tax) if possible because they are just not good products and the company is quickly becoming a monopoly. (And they lobby to prevent direct tax filing.) For most micro or small businesses it is overkill in terms of features.
Turbo tax won’t help with your bookkeeping. It just allows you to prepare taxes.
I like Xero.com personally. It is simple and cheaper than Quickbooks.
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I do my wife’s bookkeeping using Moneydance. She originally had a friend convince her that Quickbooks was the way to go. I warned her that it was overkill for what she needed and it turned out to be pretty pricey. I purchased a license for Moneydance (runs on Mac, Windows, Linux) for this purpose around 7 years ago and it has been running flawlessly ever since. She’s a consultant (medical field) and does consultations both in her office and at client homes. She provides me each month with a PDF bank statement that she writes notes on for anything out of the ordinary. She also provides a corresponding transaction file (quicken format, I forget the extension but every bank offers it or OFX and Moneydance will import both as well as csv and maybe others). I import it and then go through and review and make sure each transaction was categorized correctly. After a couple of months it remembered what the majority of transactions should be categorized to so, aside from a few each month that are out of the ordinary, it basically just does it auto-magically.
I have had to buy an upgrade license once and gladly did it as the app has been phenomenal. There is a slight learning curve to set it up but once you do it’s great.
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+1
I was a Moneydance user for several years. Eventually my credit card companies and my bank, etc. website/apps added tools that do most of what I need.