It’s a new year, so we thought it was a good time to talk about what we’ve been working on and what’s coming up.
There are 2 new “big things” happening soon with MoneyWell. I hope you’re as excited about them as we are:
MoneyWell for iPhone.
Currently we have MoneyWell Express for iPhone which is a companion app, allowing you to view bucket balances and view and enter basic transactions on the go; great for quickly entering a purchase or checking if you have enough money in a bucket, but not a “fully feature” solution.
Coming soon will be a re-written iPhone app which is (almost*) as full featured as the Mac. You’ll be able to view and create spending plans, manage recurring transactions etc.
Because it will be the “full” MoneyWell experience, theoretically not needing a Mac, it will require a valid subscription to use. However if you have a subscription for MoneyWell for Mac (either stand-alone or via iTunes Family Sharing) this will be shared with your phone.
* We’re working on the missing features and hope to add them in the coming weeks and months
Banking Connectivity
The writing has been on the wall for “Direct Connect” for some time (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). We’ve been working on alternatives. As we’ve told a number of you that have written in, it’s not just a technical problem. It’s also a regulatory one. Banks understandably don’t want to let “just anyone” connect to their servers and download people’s transactions.
We finally have a solution which will initially be available to MoneyWell customers in the USA and Canada. (We hope to be able to expand this over time subject to demand)
We’re using Plaid as our partner. When you set up a connection, you’ll verify your bank details via Plaid. Plaid will then access your bank’s API. This provides us with your transactions every time you initiate a download.
This is an optional extra. We will need to charge an additional fee beyond the base subscription. This is because of the way PLAID charges us to access transactions. We want to ensure we don’t lose money for every connection made. You’ll be able to upgrade within the app.
You’ll be able to connect to up to 10 institutions. If you have multiple accounts at the same institution, you’ll be able to connect and download transactions from as many accounts as you have. This will only use a single “institution slot”.
When?
We’re launching beta versions of MoneyWell for Mac and iOS this month. If you’re interested in joining the beta, you can contact us via the normal method(s). If you’re interested in banking, please let us know which institutions you’d like to connect to. We’re hoping to get a good range of institutions for our test. This will help us iron out any potential issues as quickly as possible.
What about <insert personal feature request>?
We still have lots more planned for MoneyWell, including of course an iPad app. We’re launching a fully featured iPhone app first. The smaller screen size enables us to get that done quicker. The re-written app will allow us to make much more progress on the iPad. We can do this without having to start again.
We’ve also got a lot of other planned improvements still to come. We hope these changes will continue with our journey to making MoneyWell a sustainable product which is useful to a large number of people in improving their financial situations.
Scotty & Matt