Wednesday, September 26, 2007

What's Coming in MoneyWell 1.1?

Everyone wants to know what's coming in future releases of MoneyWell. I think that's a reasonable request. We all have a natural curiosity and a desire to know that the software we buy has a bright future and will grow to solve more problems for us.

Now the experienced software developer in me is screaming, "Shut up! Don't promise anything that's not already in final testing. Do you want a Longhorn/Vista disaster on your hands!?!? Geez, have you learned nothing from Bill and Steve's joyride over the software precipice?" But I'm thinking, I can talk about some of the plans. I mean, what can it hurt to let you peek behind the curtain a bit, right? Wow, that voice in my head is really loud and annoying. Okay, here we go...

  • OFX/QFX Support: I wanted this in 1.0 because I have a ton of transactions per day and QIF support is marginally okay for bringing bank transactions into MoneyWell for me. I've also had several requests for comma-delimited file support from Europe and Canada, this type of import may not make the first update but it will not be forgotten.

  • Duplicate Transaction Detection: This goes hand-in-hand with the previous pain. I don't want to have to delete duplicate transactions by hand and neither does anyone else. (If I'm wrong about this and you do enjoy boring, repetitive tasks, please contact me about being a beta tester.)

  • Account Reconciliation: This is another feature that was cut from 1.0 to get it out the door. How are you supposed to track all your transactions if you can't reconcile your account to make sure none are missing? Of course this is coming.

  • Printing: We love paper! Back in 1986 when the Mac was supposed to help us create the paperless office, we started the greatest increase in personal printing in all of history (and it's not slowing down). You won't see a huge array of reports, but you will be able to get a nice-looking printout of your filtered transactions. More diverse reporting will come in the future.

  • Per Month Planning: Here's another sliced outta 1.0 feature because I couldn't get the interface working the way I wanted. With this you'll be able to set a unique spending plan amount per month per bucket.

  • Repeating/Pending Transactions: There's lots of code in MoneyWell already for this and it hurt to rip it from 1.0 so I'm going to work hard to get it into the next release.

  • Money Flow Editing: Having rollovers and money flows automatic is very nice, but there have been enough customer scenarios already to warrant adding the ability to change dates and amounts of these operations.

  • Enhanced Transfers: Allow transfers to be created/changed from the transaction detail. This will allow you to use transfers in a more flexible manner.

  • Exporting: This is a long shot for the next release, but if it misses, it will be high on the list for the next release.



Okay, that's plenty of rope to hang myself. I think I'll add a disclaimer just for good measure.

Disclaimer: Remember that none of these features are guaranteed to be in the upcoming release (or any release for that matter) and I have the ability to edit this blog entry in the future if anyone tries to use this information in any sort of extortion scheme.

Just know that my primary concern is the smooth operation of MoneyWell: Jamming a bunch of poorly executed features into software doesn't make it better, it makes it Windows Vista. (Did I just say that out loud?) My secondary concern is prompt delivery of an update: I want to have this out by December so I will cut what I have to so this will happen.

Now, feel free to pray that most of these make the release and I don't regret this curtain peek in a couple of months.

Peace.