I have been a long time user of Buxfer and have generally pleased with there online checkbook service. I never used the account sync feature that they offered (similar to Mint’s) because I like to keep my own balance verses the bank. Lately I had been noticing that both their regular and mobile sites were both running slower and slow. I did some research and found out that Buxfer is run by a lone programmer that actually has a full time job at Facebook. While he is doing his best to maintain the site if their is a crash I am pretty sure my data would be gone.
The Search
I searched around the web to see if their were any other companies out their doing something similar to Buxfer. There were a few but they were small as well and the interfaces seemed a little clunky. I decided to check out iPhone apps instead since that is actually were I do the majority of my data entry. My concern with an app was that if my phone got lost/stolen/broken that I would lose my data as well.
There were a handful of iPhone apps and after using the majority of them I ended up with PocketMoney.
Why PocketMoney
There were two main reasons why I chose this app. The first was he fact that it could do transfers between accounts. This is something that Buxfer could do and I do a lot of transfers. I was actually amazed that their were checkbooks apps out there that handle multiple accounts but cannot do transfers. Weird. The other reason I chose PocketMoney is that they have been around for a while – like since the Apple Newton. They seemed well established in the space and did not seem like they were going anywhere. They were a pretty easy choice compared to the competition.
A Groovy Data Import
As impressed as I was with the basic functions of PocketMoney their import feature was even more impressive. I ended up exporting nearly 4000 transactions between 7 accounts from Buxfer and imported them into PocketMoney on my iPhone. It was pretty simple using Buxfer’s Quicken export and PocketMoney’s Wifi Transfer for data. When all was said and done I had all the data that I had in Buxfer in PocketMoney.
Desktop App Coming
The best part about this whole transition is that the PocketMoney developers are currently working on a desktop app that syncs with the iPhone app. This is where my concerns about losing data are taken care of.