Moneywell 1.0.2 review

Moneywell is a personal finance application that turns your finances upside down.

Traditional money managers such as Quicken track your income and show how you spend it. Their weakness is that you only find out how poor you are after your money has disappeared.

Moneywell encourages you to plan your spending first and measure this against expenditure as it is recorded. This means you can see instantly if you're overspending, and balance your budget as you go.

The program uses income and expense categories, cleverly represented as buckets on the left pane of the program's main window. You can create as many buckets as you want - Moneywell comes with a quirky list of defaults, from Lawn Care to Self-improvement.

You can set a spending plan - essentially a budget - for each bucket. This can be a monthly figure or split between first and second halves of the month. As money comes in, you allocate it to your expense buckets. You can give each bucket a priority to determine the order in which they are filled. For obvious reasons, Mortgage and Groceries buckets should be prioritised over Travel buckets. If the expenditure you allocate exceeds the amount in your bucket, you're warned that you are overspending.

Moneywell acknowledges that life isn't as simple as budgeting set amounts for set categories each month. Spending patterns fluctuate, and there will inevitably be unforeseen expenditure. By dragging one bucket over another you can effectively transfer part of your spending plan between categories. The principle is that if you have money left, you can spend it as you want.

You can enter transactions individually or by importing data in QIF format from another finance application - many can export in this format - or directly from an online banking service. When we first tried downloading and importing a QIF file, Moneywell didn't understand its date format, and inadvertently planned our expenditure for the year 2028. But while we were reviewing the program an update was released to address this. It was too late to correct data already imported, but it correctly identified UK date formats on freshly imported QIF files.

Transactions appear in the main pane of the window. As well as being individually assigned to buckets, they can be memorised, so that when future transactions are imported they are allocated to buckets automatically. Usefully, you can specify which part of a transaction is memorised, from amount to payee. You can also set up aliases, so that a transaction that includes a word that matches this alias will be transferred to your chosen bucket. It's like smart filtering for finance applications.

Moneywell isn't all figures, though. A pane at the bottom of the main window shows graphically how your budget matches up against your spending over past months. The visual appeal extends to the buckets, too. When you have money to allocate, they sit upright. When empty, they tip over.

Moneywell won't suit those who prefer to take a traditional approach to their finances. But if you struggle to budget well, Moneywell could prove ideal.