PocketSmith — where have you been all my life?

I’ve been on the look out for a good personal accounting package for a while. I’ve tried tried.. pretty much all of them.

Before I skim through this — good products come from understanding the user and their problems. So this is who I am: busy, father, professional, I manage the family finances. My problems:

I want something that automatically categorises expenditures so I know if we’re sticking to our budget.

Yep. Thats about it. Just one problem. I’ve been searching for years and have never found a suitable solution.

Mint — I used it in the States. It was ok. But it’s not available where I live.
Xero — they’re targeted at business. The categorisation was baaaad. They’d cut off the transaction description so you couldn’t read for context. Here’s my tweet to them on this from years ago:

Buxfer — This is a lesser known one. I used them for about six months ($5/mo). They let me manually categorise. The problem was it was owned by some guy who’d gotten funded for or sold some other venture so therefore was no longer interested in this platform. It had real promise because not only would it let me categorise — it had graphs. I just wanted simple graphs to evaluate our spending. I was manually importing from bank via CSV but corrupted the account one day. I couldn’t fix it so just wiped it out.
Software — quick books, quicken, no way.
You need a budget (YNAB) — its just flat out horrible at this. Amazingly horrible.
Use a bank like ANZ that has this — I don’t want to. I’m with a credit union and don’t want to move.
PocketBook — I loved what they’re doing. I’ve literally checked back on their website 10 times to see if/when they’ll support my bank. They’ve been focused on a strange direction with helping people file taxes. There’s so many solutions out there for that. Just get the banks plugged in people.

So… I could go on. I tried them all. I’ve spent hours setting up test accounts, etc etc.

Then I found Pocket Smith. Where have you been? You need to find a new/better PR or Partnerships Manager because the world needs to know about you.

They’ve focused on the right problems

Instead of trying to integrate all the banks themselves, they use a third party that does that, Yodelee, to import my bank data. Yodelee actually integrates with my bank and also auto-categorises my transactions so it’s a double win.
They’ve got graphs that let me see my spending in a category over time and let me set budgets for categories.

Here’s what they could improve

Make the categorisation even better! Own this feature — do a better job at auto-categorising than Yodlee does. It’s totally possible when you look at how all users really categorise.
When you’re in transactions view, recategorising a transaction is painful. You have to click into it, then use the dropdown which on osx if you scroll down to get the last item, it scrolls the page, then select the category then click save… It’s a mission. Why not just let me activate the category dropdown right in the list row and just save the change when I select. Here’s a video of my difficulty: http://screencast.com/t/21XtNKQk
Its actually easier to use the left hand checkbox in the list row, select “category” in the top, select the category, and click save. Bulk action is much faster.
They’ve created a “Categorise items” tool which is fantastic. This exists on web and mobile. It brings up transactions as one “card” at a time. I have two problems with it. (a) there’s no back button in case you skip and want to go back. (b) if I select a category from the dropdown, just save and go to the next, don’t make me click “save” (if I make a mistake I could go back right?). (c) better yet, don’t even make it a dropdown, just make it a select list so I don’t have to click once to get into the dropdown and again to select.

Thats it. My feedback revolves around my one pain point. You might think people have these long lists of obscure requests — no if you do one thing really well, then you’re in.

For example, Gmail — when they came out they just had a great search and the concept of threaded conversations. Those two pain relievers were enough to convert over droves of Outlook users. It’s the same for so many other products out there.

OK Pocket Stitch. Know your users, keep focusing on keeping the things you’ve done better and better!