Abandoning Ganteng Monthly Budget

The reason why I created Ganteng Monthly Budget is simply because I could not find a good budget tracking app for my Android phone. I used Financisto before while it is a really good app, after a while the performance degrades. It’s really slow to add entries and sometimes the screen just froze when I tried to type the amount. Maybe it is Samsung Galaxy S problem, maybe it’s Financisto problem, I don’t know and I don’t care. I only know it is slow and that sucks. That’s why I decide to use Google Spreadsheet instead (Microsoft Excel is another alternative too)

However I always knew that spreadsheet is not the best way to go, it has limited mobile support and rather slow to load from the phone, it’s much slower to load when you have thousands of records, but I simply had no choice. Until I decided to join the dark side. I began hunting for good financial tracking apps, there are some candidates namely:

  • ExpenseTracker - I accidentally bought the app, I didn’t know that the Lite/Free version existed. The app has a very nice UI but it’s rather limited in feature (you can’t have an overview of all accounts, only one account at a time), no CSV import, no budgeting, etc
  • iXpenseIt - I tried the Lite version first but I can’t really remember why I decided not to go for this app. One reason that I remember though, enough with the i already! Just leave the iApps to Apple!
  • PocketMoney - Winner. I tried the Lite version first and I simply love the flexibility this app can offer. You can import QIF, CSV, TDF, OFX/QFX format, support multiple currencies, budgeting, overview of all accounts, and the company has a long term development history (since Apple Newton). I just found out that originally the app costs $9.99, so $4.99 is a steal :)

I wrote a step by step migration tutorial to migrate from Ganteng Monthly Budget to PocketMoney

Abandon ship!

PS - Some comparison between PocketMoney, iExpenseIt and iBearMoney in PocketMoney’s forum page

Update: I remember why I don’t like iXpenseIt now, while it’s an excellent expense tracking app, that’s just it, it is not an app to keep track of your balances/accounts and all that, it’s just for expenses :)