About iBank 3

IBank makes it easy to keep track of incomings and outgoings. The program lists current, savings and investment accounts as well as other assets and liabilities in its left-hand pane, with transactions and reports in the main area of the window.

About iBank 3
It is, we assume, coincidental that an update to iBank 3 has arrived in the middle of a global liquidity crisis. But the timing is apt: there's surely no better time to think about organising your finances.

Thankfully iBank makes it easy to keep track of incomings and outgoings. The program lists current, savings and investment accounts as well as other assets and liabilities in its left-hand pane, with transactions and reports in the main area of the window.

A critical aspect of any finance application is how easy is it to track transactions. iBank can import statements from your online bank in QIF, OFX and CSV formats. Reconciling them to iBank data is now superbly easy - you can drag unreconciled transactions over a statement to add them to it.

One of the most promising-looking additions is what iBank terms 'direct downloads' - the ability to interact directly with your bank. It's a feature that until now has been missing from every Mac home-finance application on this side of the Atlantic. And sadly, we're still waiting.

Not one UK bank appears on the connection list, made up almost exclusively of larger US institutions. But at least you can connect to your online bank from within the program another way, as iBank sports a built-in web browser.

When we last looked at iBank we complained that it couldn't automatically categorise data as it was imported. This weakness no longer exists. You can specify smart import rules that allow you to map imported data. In turn, this converts the near-gobbledegook that can appear on an online statement into something meaningful. It automatically assigns it a category too.

UK users fare slightly better when tracking share values. A Portfolio shows the market value of stocks and shares based on data supplied over the Internet - so you can get a near-live valuation.

Major UK shares are covered, although the slight US bias means that few UK funds can be tracked.

Surprisingly for a financial application iBank requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Its use of 10.5-only technologies occasionally seems frivolous, such as the ability to browse transactions in Cover Flow mode. But you can now apply photo-realistic images to categories, which makes them more recognisable in this mode.

The use of Core Animation for the program's graphs works really well - pie charts look fantastic as they animate when data is changed. Also the animation is backed by a healthy, though not exhaustive, choice of reports - from balance sheets to a report on the return on investment of your stock portfolio.

The cleverest new addition to iBank though is iPhone syncing. Like the program's automatic backup feature, it requires a .Mac subscription but is wonderfully easy to use. You add a program-supplied file to the root level of your .Mac server and select iBank's .Mac synchronisation menu option to upload transaction data to .Mac. You can then view, edit and delete these on your iPhone through its web interface, so it's possible to update your finances on the go.

The only awkward drawback to all this is that there's no automatic synchronisation: you have to remember to synchronise in iBank each time that you make a local or remote change.

iBank is a great-looking personal finance application and for good measure it's no slouch on features either.
Needs Mac OS X 10.5.1 or later
Author: Tom Gorham
iBank 3



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