Koku Will Sort You Out Financially

I have wrestled with finance software more times than I care to admit. I've tried going iPhone only, Mac only, and a combination of the two. After a while, I settled on the belief that only a software package that syncs over-the-air would be worth using, but none of them ever got me to keep my financial records in order. Then I stopped using finance software for months. I then had the notion a few weeks ago that I wanted my finance software to be as easy as a GTD app. By that, I mean, I wanted an inbox . In Omnifocus, I can just add a bunch of tasks to the inbox and it syncs back to my Macs and I can process them all later at home (or on the iPhone if I'm so inclined.) The point is, I don't need to be able to do everything on my phone. And to be honest, I hadn't found a Mac finance app that fit my needs either. MoneyWell had too much going on, Squirrel didn't work out for me, and none of the other apps felt right. (Cha-Ching was the exception but the developer of Cha-Ching were a bit scummy. If you used Cha-Ching, you'll remember they didn't keep you up to date on the progress of Cha-Ching's Mac beta, the iPhone app was buggy as Hell, and when they got bought out by Intuit, they pulled all the software down and customers were given the proverbial "middle finger.") Then I remembered Koku . I had downloaded a demo of Koku and I liked the look of it, but I had written it off because there was no iPhone app. With my new plan of keeping financial tracking down to an inbox on the iPhone, I was free to try out Koku again. I started keeping a list of what I spent money on and how much in Simplenote, which syncs OTA back to nvALT on my Macs, and when I had the time, I could fire up Koku, whose library file I'm syncing over Dropbox, and process all the inbox items. Once in Koku, I could date, title and tag all my transactions. Koku doesn't have MoneyWell's buckets and doesn't allow for budgeting, but I've found that budgeting for things is a waste of time, for me at least . I wanted software that would keep all my transactions together, make them easy to drill down through, and tagging does the trick. Koku is also smart enough to know when one kind of tag is a sub-tag of another automatically without you having to actually create a hierarchy. For example: train ticket tagged as travel, train hotel room tagged as travel, hotel Koku will automatically associate both as travel items, but you can drill down inside of travel and you'll find train and hotel on your distribution reports. Oh yes, there are reports. Koku does three kinds of reports: summary reports , which list balances on all your accounts, distribution reports , which create pie charts from the tags you've associated with transactions, and history reports which give you a bar graph showing income or expenses over time. For each kind of report, you can tell Koku which accounts to use, which tags to use, and what time period to use. For time periods, you can use day, week, month, quarter or year, including this… , last… , and in the last… . After tweaking the settings, I've come up with seven or eight really useful reports to see things like my daily spending for the month, what I spent money on this month, how much income came from my day job versus the private English lessons I teach in the evenings. I was shocked to see how much of my total income private lessons had become. It never dawned on me how much I was relying on them until I saw it in a pie chart. One of Koku's biggest selling points is its Direct Connect functionality. You can connect to American banks directly and import up-to-date financial data. Koku can do this automatically in the background once you set it up. It won't work for non-U.S. banks though, so if you aren't in the U.S., you're stuck manually downloading and importing statement data at the end of your billing cycle. My Japanese banks of course won't work with Koku's Direct Connect, but my American accounts would, if Koku could work with two different currencies! The biggest gripe I have with Koku is that you can only use the currency that is the default for your Mac. This means that if you're like me and want to manage a library for one currency and a second library for another currency, you're S.O.L. I emailed Fading Red, the developer, but got no answer about when it would be possible to manage multiple currencies. I'd love to have a "Japanese" library and an "American" library with separate yen and dollar settings. Some people might not like that Koku has no iPhone app. You can check balances or add transactions when you're away from your Mac, but for the most part, I'm very happy with Koku. Should they create an iPhone app eventually, I hope it maintains the simplicity of the Mac app and I'd be very happy to see a "transaction inbox" included. Koku is just $29.99 in the Mac App Store .

You can listen to Koku Will Sort You Out Financially online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Koku Will Sort You Out Financially is an episode from Kernel Panic.

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This episode was published on Oct 14, 2011.

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