I believe that now is a particularly appropriate time for people to consider using a personal accounts/finance management app. This is for 2 main reasons: to counter fraud; and to manage the pressures of rising living costs in the face of rampant inflation.

• More and more innocent people are losing their hard earned money to fraudsters, over the phone and online, through carefully crafted, credible scams. Subscription scams are becoming ever more widespread. A great way to protect yourself against these fraudsters is to keep a close eye on your bank account online and check that your bank’s record of transactions tallies with your own record of what you have spent.
• When money is tight, it is very useful to be able to keep constant track of your net worth (the total of your assets, such as bank and savings accounts, less the total of your liabilities, such as credit card and loan accounts) and to see where your money is going so that you can control your expenditure.

There are a large number of macOS and iOS banking apps available to help manage your personal accounts but many of them download transactions from your online banking app by default. If you have your banking app set up to import transactions from your bank automatically, it can be difficult to spot any transactions that you didn’t make or didn’t intend to authorise. If you enter your purchases into your banking app manually and reconcile your transactions regularly, you will spot suspicious withdrawals promptly and be able to protect yourself against further losses. You may even be able to recover any loss, if you act quickly and inform your bank in good time.

Entering your transactions manually also gives you the opportunity to record exactly what you are spending your money on, review where your money is going and then adjust your future spending behaviour appropriately.

Ever since I got my first computer, I have used various programs / apps to track and control my personal finances. I started off using a spreadsheet but soon found that burdensome. I used Microsoft Money for many years and even continued to do so after I had seen the light and become a Mac user (running MS Money on a Windows virtual machine using Parallels). Eventually, I discovered Home Accountz and was able to cut loose from Windows. Unfortunately, Home Accountz is no longer supported; Accountz.com Ltd closed a couple of years ago. Also, much as I like Home Accountz, I did not like the workaround that had to be applied to enter split transactions (where multiple expense categories apply to a single payment). So, I started to develop my own application to replace Home Accountz. The result is MyNetWorth. My wife and I have used it ever since I completed its first development version and we felt that MyNetWorth was good enough to share with others, possibly even good enough to be sold (and thereby and raise some funds for All Saints’ Church, Mattersey, for which I am the Treasurer).

Once I had completed MyNetWorth I started developing a sister iOS app to allow MyNetWorth users with iOS devices to access and edit their transaction data when on the move and away from their Mac desktop/laptop via iCloud. The result is MyNetWorth’s sister iOS app, iNetWorth. I recently bundled MyNetWorth and iNetWorth together in NetWorth Bundle, so that MyNetWorth users have affordable access to its sister iOS app and iNetWorth users, who gain access to a Mac device, can gain the full benefits of the macOS GUI (although iNetWorth runs on macOS as a Mac Catalyst app) by downloading MyNetWorth at a very reasonable price.

MyNetWorth and iNetWorth are what I would call no-nonsense apps. They are both sophisticated but straightforward and, like Home Accountz, squarely based on the solid accounting foundation of double entry bookkeeping, which is logical and easy to follow. The graphics included are not gimmicky; they are there simply to support the user in appreciating the impact of the underlying data quickly and easily. To my mind, the extensive (excessive?) use of graphics and icons in some apps can confuse the user and reduce their parent app’s usability - but then I am bound to be biased (not invented here syndrome!).

Please note that I have also published preview versions of both apps, called MyNetWorth PreView and iNetWorthPreView , so that potential users can try before they buy (and reuse any data that they entered in the preview version). Both are available on the App Store. Please follow the links behind the app names above to try them out. Any feedback would be welcomed. Any downloads that lead to a purchase of the full versions would be particularly appreciated! I have published online User Guides for all 4 apps, to which there are links inside each app and also on the Support page of my developer website. These guides were built with Middlemac and reflect the Apple Help Book format (complete with the normal search capabilities).

Happy coding!