There are plenty of offerings in the App Store to track your finances on the go. So Midnight Apps’ Cha-Ching Touch is just another addition to a crowded space then, right? Not exactly. Besides bringing their stunning user interface and ease of use to the iPhone/iPod touch, Cha-Ching Touch is also location aware, which makes logging transactions that much simpler! Oh, and then there’s the added benefit of being able to sync with the desktop version of Cha-Ching too. Interested? Here’s a peek at what you can look forward to once it is released in the coming weeks.
Budgeting
I think it’s safe to say that Cha-Ching Touch easily tracks your expenditures — as do all the apps in this space. So one standout feature for me is the budgeting. Entering the total amount you have to work with for the month gets you started. From there you have over three dozen useful categories to choose from, to allocate your funds and track spending. (‘App Store’ is one of the budget categories…probably one that many of us could use, eh?) If you need to add a category that is absent — I added ‘business meals’ — you can do so in the settings. There’s an overall budgetary meter showing how much you’re in the black (or red), and then each of the categories has a similar meter as well. Budgeting in Cha-Ching Touch can quickly show you where all that extra money goes each month, if you’re not already aware.
Payees
At first I was a bit annoyed at the necessity to add each of the Payees I need. Sure, I’ve got some regular payees like my mortgage (yeah, I’m one of the suckers actually paying their mortgage…), the grocery store, Target, etc., but there are so many more that tend to be one-offs or rarely patronized. I should have known better than to worry, Midnight Apps has thought it all through already.
What I’ve found, is that when I need to log a new transaction and I haven’t yet created the Payee, it’s ridiculously quick to do so — and it should be, because presumably you’ll add the new Payee as you make a purchase at that place. Then the next time you need to use that Payee, it’s even quicker and completely painless to add a new transaction. You can also mark them as favorites, which will come in handy as your list grows (quickly) out of control.
Location awareness (especially useful on the 3G with GPS) comes into play with the Payees as well. Assuming you add the transaction — and the Payee for the first time — at the actual location, you can attach the current location to your Payee. So the next time you’re there you just let Cha-Ching Touch tell you which Payees are nearby and select the one you need. This is a nice feature, but I do see room for improvement. For instance, there are about 6 Conoco gas stations between my home and work that I may stop at, and setting a single location for my Conoco Payee doesn’t help much. I’ve already submitted the idea to mimic the functionality of OmniFocus (for iPhone), where you can tag the location as a business search to be dynamic, rather than hard coding a single place. No idea if this’ll happen in the official release, but I think it would greatly increase the usefulness of the location feature.
The only downside I found with using Payees, is that you can assign them categories (which are tied to your Budgets), and sometimes a single category doesn’t do the trick. In this case, you’ll need to add the Payee more than once, each time giving it a different category (which are differentiated by nice little icons). If you want to fully utilize the Budgets feature, this may be a necessary step, and while a tad clunky, it’s really not too painful.
Gallery
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1 / 120-cha-chingtouch -
2 / 121-passcodelock -
3 / 122-acctinfo -
4 / 123-transactions -
5 / 124-search -
6 / 125-budgets -
7 / 126-grocerybudget -
8 / 127-flaggedtransaction -
9 / 128-payees -
10 / 129-payeefav -
11 / 1210-scheduled -
12 / 1211-sync
Syncing
The forthcoming version 2 of Cha-Ching for Mac is still in beta, and you can check it out here. If you don’t use Cha-Ching on your desktop, you can still utilize Cha-Ching Touch to manage your finances on the go — they certainly function independently of one another. Assuming however, that your desktop is the main platform for keeping all of your master records, you may be manually entering transactions on a finance app for your iPhone, and then again later on your Mac in another application. But if you are a current (or prospective) Cha-Ching user, the ability to sync the two (which comes in version 2) is fantastic! Enter a transaction once, return to your Mac, sync the two, and move on with your life.
Beta/Release
Enough rambling, you say? Ok, here’s what you need to know to get Cha-Ching Touch. It’s still in closed beta testing, but you can head over to the Midnight Apps preview page and sign up to be notified when it’s baked and ready to serve. (There’s also a Midnight Apps Twitter account if you’re into that sort of thing.) In the meantime, you may want to give the desktop version of Cha-Ching a try, and see how you like it — and if you’re a current user, you may find the version 2 interface is far better than the original, at least that’s my opinion.
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