[Mac. OS X] iCompta tutorial - Manage Your Financial Life

Powerful Money Manager

I consider finding iCompta around the same time as reading Dean’s article as a nudge to start managing my money more seriously. I’ve come across Buddi before (mentioned here, here and here), but never succeeded in persuading me to take the first step.

After playing around with iCompta a little bit and seeing what it can do, I think I’ll settle with this particular software to manage finances.

There are three categories on the left pane:

• Accounts: is the place to list down all your accounts such as bank accounts, Paypal, and credit cards; and all the money that comes in and out. You can set different currencies and assign different persons for each account.
• Budgets: is the place to list down your expense and income. You can put household, personal and/or company budget here.
• People: is the place to list down the people with the account. They could be family members, office partners, or just yourself.

You can add new accounts, budgets, and people clicking on the ‘Add’ button at the bottom left of the window.

I don’t live in a country that trades with the US dollar so the first thing that I adjusted was the “Categories & Currencies”

The app automatically put my country’s currency as the default. And every time I added a new one, iCompta would connect to the web and automatically calculate the exchange rate using the default currency as the base.

There’s also an option to add categories here. Just click on the plus button (+), define the category, and choose a color for it. You’d want to add as many detailed categories as possible because they will come in handy later.

The next step I took was creating accounts. Aside from assigning name, there are also options to set the currency, account type, owner and co-owner of the account. If you have cards (credit and debit) related to the account, you could add them here.

Finished with the accounts, I moved on to People. iCompta integrates well with Mac’s address book so you could get the names from it. Don’t forget to set the currency for each person.

Then there are the budgets. They are the tools to track the money flow on a periodical basis. For each budget item, you could add related accounts and categories with their amount. The amount could be positive (credit) or negative (debit). To set a repeating budget, leave the ending date empty.

The hardest part

Basically, that’s about everything that you have to do to start managing your money with iCompta. But the hardest part is yet to come.

To really get the result, you have to use the app consistently. Add each and every transaction right after it happens and do not procrastinate. (I’m actually talking to myself here)

iCompta comes with tools to help you with the general monitoring and overall progress. There are reports, statistic pie chart, and balance evolution graph. All these are accessible from the bottom bar of the window.

Since I’ve just started, I don’t have anything to show yet. We’ll see what happens after a month. With the help of iCompta, I think I’ll be able make a difference.

One thing is missing, though; iCal integration. It would be nice if iCompta could add regular expenses to iCal and create reminder few days before they are due.

Do you manage your financial life? Have you tried iCompta? Do you know other free alternatives? Share using the comment below.