Flowing Pennies is no longer being supported.


What my accounting used to look like
Do your family finances look like this? Mine did. Consider the image to the right: I’ve replaced store names with generic names, and the transaction amounts have been fudged to protect the innocent; but this sheet would fit right in within my “finances” notebook alongside scores of other pages like this, representing years of family finances.
Until I came to my senses...

What my accounting looks like with Flowing Pennies

The view to the left is Flowing Pennies’ “Simple Transaction List View.”

This is what your finances can look like with Flowing Pennies.

If you look carefully, you can see that each image represents the same set of transactions.

The simple view shows each transaction, its amount, and its effect on your personal finances. While each transaction is color-coded according to its account, the main focus of this view is not zeroed in upon accounts, but rather on how all the transactions in the single list affect your personal finances.

And if you like meat with your potatoes, here is the same set of transactions in Flowing Pennies’ other view, “Ledger Transaction List View.”

The ledger view shows the effect each transaction has upon your accounts. This view still shows all transactions in a single list, but acknowledges that the running balance of each account is important to track. Along with columns for a transaction description and transaction amount, there are columns for each account that may be updated for each transaction.

Both of these views are useful in different circumstances, but what they have in common is this: they allow you to track how your finances affect your bottom line. Quickly scanning a month’s financial history is the work of glancing at a page or two of a single list. You don’t have to tab around between accounts and try to manually sew together their impact on your finances in your head.

Flowing Pennies is designed to make your entire financial workflow behave as intuitively and smoothly as a checkbook register.

Adding and manipulating transactions in Flowing Pennies happens in the footer bar of the Flowing Pennies window.

Add a New Transaction
Everything from adding new transactions...

... to editing transactions...

Reconcile an Account
... to reconciling your account balances with an online or hard-copy statement ...

... can be done using different footer modes.

(You can use OS X’s autocomplete feature when you are entering new transactions: press ESC or F5 when you are entering a new transaction description and you will see alternatives for your new entry.)

You can switch between footer modes using the footer mode selector in the toolbar. For a description of each footer bar, you can check out The Life Cycle of a Transaction.

Different people learn new concepts in different ways.

The Life Cycle of a Transaction is perfect if you are a “bottom-up” learner like me. I like to learn the details first, then figure out how the pieces fit together.

But if you’re a “top-down” learner or a “big-picture” person, you might find the examples of User Stories more informative.