Excellent app. Needs some tweaks.

It really ticks me off when I’ve gladly paid full price for an app, but they continue bugging me to write a review. I can understand this for free apps, but it just feels unprofessional when developers keep “demanding” this of their loyal paying customers. I realize that good reviews help them a lot, but maybe ask once, and then just drop it. You’ve got our money, but you’re running dangerously close to making your customers actually start hating you.

I’m a retired software developer, and I know good software when I see it. I reviewed a gazillion Mac/iOS finance apps, and ended up choosing MoneyWiz because it is truly well thought out and rich is features. Their customizable transaction entry layout and their iOS version were the two things that tipped the scales for me. Really, the iOS version of this app is magical and effortless to use. This Mac version is also outstanding, at least for how I need to use it.

There are a couple of things they could do to speed up the work flow. The main one for me is when entering an Expense, you start typing in the Payee’s name and it pops up a window to the right filled with the closest matches. That’s great. But then it feels like you have to jump through way too many hoops to select the one you want. Why do they make me hit the down arrow to move over to that second window, then arrow down in that separate window and then hit the space bar to select the one I want? It took me forever to figure out how to do that with the keyboard instead of having to always use the mouse. It just feels overly complicated. My other Mac apps simply drop down the list immediately below the field where I’m typing, and let me arrow straight down to the item I want and press Return. Much faster. I hope these guys will improve this process.

Also, and this is minor, but it just makes me wonder why this has not come up a thousand times with previous customers… I’m fairly certain that everyone living in the free world who would need an app like this probably has to throw out their trash on some regular basis, and I’m also guessing they pay some local trash pickup service to haul it away every week. So then it stands to reason that if those same people are logging that expense into MoneyWiz, they would want to set up a category for Trash Pickup. It seems like a very common expense category, just like Electricity, Water and Internet. Why then is there no trashcan icon in this app? I went to the trouble of choosing icons for all of my other 25 or so categories, but had to choose a forklift as my trash pickup category, because that was the closest thing I could find to something being hauled away. Sure, put a rugby ball icon in there, because, you know, we all have a rugby ball category! Like I said, it’s a minor issue for sure, but it would thrill us to no end to see them release an update with a much-needed trashcan icon. It’s the little things in life ya know!

HeresMyTwoCents about MoneyWiz 2 - Personal Finance, v2.3.3