The need

Everybody has personal finances and the related personal finance issues, and we found we all needed a better solution than the traditional spreadsheet.

We found a couple of existing solutions, but they didn't really offer what we needed, and while some were quite good, they didn't apply to our personal needs. We asked around and found others had the same problem.

So our goal was to build a personal finance manager that fills the 2 major needs: keep a good ledger & offer good reports

Core functionality

We started by laying out out the required functionality: the core of any personal finance application are the expenses and incomes. For incomes we found that for most of us, it consists of regular entries, so we build a system that allows the user to define a recurrence that will automatically add his income monthly or weekly.

Both expenses and incomes we organized into accounts, in order to allow the separation of the cash from bank accounts and savings accounts so we also added transfers as well as recurrent between accounts. We found that credit card accounts have a somewhat special function, so the overdraft accounts allow to track the account's overdraft and maximum available balance.

Probably all of us forgot to pay a bill at one time, so we added the bill management functionality that automatically reminds us of monthly bills and manages their payments and due date, so we never forget to pay a bill again.

Finally, we all borrow or lend money, so a module that manages our loans was an obvious addition.

The reporting

Now that the user has the need to keep a ledger covered, it was time to cover the other major need: the reporting.

All expenses and bills are organized into budgeted categories in order to allow us to efficiently monitor our expenses as we make them. The reports also allow to track the evolution of the expenses in a category over a period of multiple months.

Additional reporting is provided for the incomes and expenses, as well as a financial health indicator that permanently shows the real balance considering the loans and credit card overdraft.

The mobile

Expenses mostly happen when you're not on your computer, and with Today's mobile world, the need to have CashControl with you was obvious, so CashControl has an iPhone and Android application on the way, to help the users easily add expenses, incomes, transfers and manage their bills and account balances on the go.

The result

The feedback we've got from our users was great! They said CashControl helps them make more savings and finally answer the "where did the money go" monthly question.