In a recent article about the future of personal finance, Vincent Turner reviewed a number of ways he felt that the internet will continue to change the way we manage our money, including historical transactional data, online payments, offline payments, and banking.  What caught my eye was this assessment: “Personal finance is software that the mainstream needs, but doesn’t love. No one loves logging into their bank account but most accept that they need to know how much money they have as a binary indicator of whether they can do whatever it is they want to do next.” This is a message that we have embraced since the early days of CheckBook’s creation. That personal finance should be something that you do in order to clear your mind and make room for all the other things you want to think about and do.
CheckBook came into being when its creators were looking for a personal finance application. Not finding what they wanted, they set out to design something new. Something that would take the guessing out of money management without the feature bloat that can make finances seem so daunting.
Looking at the options that are available now, Turner speculated about the future of  personal finance managers.  Turner pointed out that currently, “…there is no dominant brand that the Internet associates with personal finance in the same way we think of eBay, Amazon, Google and Facebook when we think of classifieds, shopping, search and social.”
Though I am clearly biased toward CheckBook Pro as a personal finance manager, I wonder if there can ever really be one dominant personal finance application for everyone. As other posts have highlighted, personal finance management is personal.
Each individual has to decide what works for them. We are continuing to add and update as we receive feedback from users (though not at the speed of light, the engines in this ship are working at capacity).
What will the future bring?