Comments on: Flying Money Manager – MS Money and Quicken Symbian phone companion

By: Massagesessel Blog

Massagesessel Blog — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:26:22 +0000

Impressive… Nice article and perhaps great software.

By: peter

peter — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:36:04 +0000

When i export the data from flying money and import into the quicken,but the categroy can’t display.Please help me to slove this problem.Thanks~~

By: Pablo

Pablo — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:45:05 +0000

I’ve tried Flying money, but as some have mentioned I’m not so impress by it.
Recently I changed my old nokia 6620 (in which I had Xcite software’s XS finance), but saddly is not available (yet) for symbian v3 phones.

Having used Flying money for over 3 weeks now, I often find myslef looking back at my old phone, just waiting for xs finance to be released.

By: Frank

Frank — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:50:39 +0000

Can anyone tell me where I can download a copy of FlyingMoney Manager v2.1(6) NOT v2.1(9)! which I purchased two days ago from Handango.com. The old version was working flawlessly and I was more or less happy with it. I managed to import all my Quicken accounts (11 altogether), some going back as far as the year 2000! It needed a helping hand because it cannot seem to handle transfers properly but with a little hard work and patience I managed to tidy everything up and everything worked smoothly from then on. Until I decided to buy the full version v2.1(9)! The list of problems is too long to go into. Suffice it to say that it’s of no use to me at all! That’s why I would like to go back to v2.1(6) to see if I can use it with my registration key. So if anyone has got a copy or point me in the right direction I’d be very grateful. Thanks!

Frank

By: Suraj

Suraj — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:32:49 +0000

Julie, That’s a strong feedback. Appreciate it. I’ll try out FlyingMoney again and let you know. Keep the comments coming.

By: Julie

Julie — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:24:51 +0000

P.S. I was using version v2.1(6) of Flying Money.
I’ve just remembered more of the things that slowed down data entry:
- the requirement to explicitly select a transaction type from a list for every transaction, AND that the first option in the list is Deposit, not Payment. I only wish that was what I do most often. Most of my deposits and transfers are regular/scheduled, so I wouldn’t need to enter them manually anyway. There is no option (as far as I can see) to have a default transaction type of Payment which you can change on the rather less frequent occasions when you actually want to record a Deposit or a Transfer. And once you’ve started entering details, there’s no way to convert from one type to another – you have to abandon and start again with the correct type of transaction.
- the currency field (which won’t often change for most people) is before the Category field (which will typically be entered for every transaction) in the dialog.
- I can’t just start to type a Payee’s name and have it gradually refine to only those Payees that match what I’ve typed so far. Just like categories, I have to scroll all the way through my existing list (which could be extensive after a reasonable amount of use), or select Options | New to create a new one.
- You need to select a separate tab on the data entry screen for entering notes about the transaction. This (IMHO) is likely to be required far more often than the currency field on the main page … especially if you could temporarily set the default currency for data entry whilst traveling abroad, for instance.

By: Julie

Julie — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:02:11 +0000

I have to say I’m not as impressed as Suraj by FlyingMoney Manager. I downloaded the trial version nearly 2 weeks ago, and (as always with mobile finance apps) started by creating my Bank Account and importing a month’s worth of transactions to it from my Desktop app (or rather, attempting to). This should give me the regular transactions on the account, create the categories and subcategories they need, and also set up the associated accounts that money gets regularly transferred into or out of, with the correct account names to allow me to export and import transactions between the two applications (mobile and desktop) with each understanding the account name on both ends of a transfer transaction.

Sadly, the import was a big mess, with no way (that I could find) to specify which account I was importing to, other than only having one account created. Although some transactions got imported correctly, others (and I could find no real pattern) got arbitrarily imported into another account altogether – one that had been created by one of the transfer transactions. (I never even bothered trying to import my Credit Card account transactions.) Export FROM Flying Money to QIF puts dates in dd/mmm/yyyy format (and none of the other personal finance apps I have access to can handle that date format in a QIF, either refusing to import altogether, or ignoring the date and using today’s), so I wouldn’t have been able to use it to update my desktop app, without editing the QIF file anyway – just too much bother.

I also find the cross-account Register approach very unintuitive (why not just list transactions within an account like most other personal finance apps?), and although you can FILTER for only one account, you can’t easily tell by looking at the screen which account you’re looking at, and worse, the option to filter for an account is right at the bottom of the menu. Yes, it’s useful to be able to search for a transaction or even report on certain groups of transactions across multiple accounts, but I feel it complicates things unnecessarily for the default view.

In general, the display is cluttered, and difficult to read and interpret, with every transaction split across 2 lines – necessary if your standard view is not per account, but not a good design IMHO.

But the killer for me was how long-winded it is to enter transactions. For me, the whole point of having a personal finance app on a MOBILE device is so that you can enter transactions at the time of purchase (or more-or-less at purchase). FlyingMoney requires that you select every field and go into edit mode for that field. You can’t just arrow down and type, and there’s no character matching for categories … you have to scroll through the whole list every time to pick the one(s) you want. Yes, I know you can set up regular transactions to speed things up, but I want ad hoc data entry to be fast too. There was no way I was ever going to be able to stand at a till with my receipt and quickly enter the name of the shop, how much I’d spent and categorise the spending.

I have reported all this via FlyingMoney’s support page (and re-entered my message several days later), but I still haven’t received so much as an automated acknowledgement from them 12 days on, despite their support page saying they reply within 24 hours. And of course, the trial period will expire any day now.

So I’ll be sticking with the (Free) JABPLite, which, despite being a Java app, has much better data entry (I don’t know how it does it, but unlike most Java apps, it DOESN’T require you to bring up a separate edit screen for every field – you can just type in every field directly, it DOES have a Quickstart “just enter a transaction now” mode, and does have ways to do quick matching for categories).

Julie

By: Flüge

Flüge — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 09:38:09 +0000

I am really impressed of the idea of the Flying Money Manager. It looks like a supporting system that enhances your understanding and handling of money. Thanks to your really good description, I will think about buying this program…

By: Suraj Venkataraman

Suraj Venkataraman — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:33:06 +0000

Hi senbel,
The sync is actually misleading. You can export a file in the .qif format and then import it to quicken.

By: senbel

senbel — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:26:51 +0000

Hi, will this software sync directly to Quicken when the phone is plugged to the PC….?