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I haven’t computerized my personal finance account management, unless you count a couple of times a year printing out a hard copy of a worksheet form that I use for tracking my bank accounts and mutual funds with a pen and hand-held calculator.

In my limited experimentation with money management software, I’ve always found the data entry part too time-consuming and tedious, and while my method is messy, it’s time-efficient and does the job I need it to do.

However, I figure (pun intended) that I’m in the minority on this count (redux) among computer users. Indeed, I’ve been told many times that the availability of Intuit’s Quicken program for the Mac is a make-or-break factor with respect to switching or even staying with Apple’s OS platform. Who am I to argue?

So, the emergence of a competitive alternative to Quicken for OS X must be considered great news for Mac fans. Modeless Software, Inc.’s new Liquid Ledger is not yet a mature product, but the current version seems to be very solid base to build on, and yet offers for of compatibility with Quicken QIF files as an added enticement to check it out.

Product Features
• Record Bank Account and Credit Card Activity
• Track Income, Expenses, Investments, Assets and Liabilities
• Manage Foreign Currency Accounts
• Translate the Value of Foreign Currencies into a Designated Home Currency
• Track Capital Gains and Losses
• Obtain Summary Information with a Single Click
• Utilize Unlimited Undo/Redo Support

Designed exclusively for Mac OS X and rooted in extensive user interface research, Cocoa-based Liquid Ledger offers a dynamic workflow and a customizable interface. You can tailor the interface to the task at hand, by hiding as much or as little of it as you want, and you can customize toolbars and workflows to suit your individual style and needs.

“We made an enthusiastic decision to develop Liquid Ledger exclusively for Mac OS X,” says Modeless president Itrat Khan, “Liquid Ledger combines the power of a robust accounting engine with a smooth, next-generation operating system to bring a new level of clarity and organization to personal finance management. We know there are Mac OS X users looking for a viable alternative in this category of software, and we’re excited to bring Liquid Ledger to market.”

To install Liquid Ledger, download the compressed file, mount the disk image, and drag the LL icon to the Applications folder on your hard drive. You will need to have your Liquid Ledger registration key ready.

With Liquid Ledger’s comprehensive feature set, you can record bank and credit card activity, manage the trading activity of your investments, and track assets and liabilities denominated in foreign currencies.

Liquid Ledger can read Quicken Interchange Format (QIF) files to help you download account activity from financial institutions. Importing data from another financial package, such as Quicken, is somewhat more complex and not yet supported. In particular. Modeless is implementing additional logic to address ambiguities in the QIF specification, and plans to optimise Liquid Ledger to better manage the large amounts of data one might accumulate from several years worth of activity. They plan to officially support Quicken data migration in the near future.

Liquid ledger can import the following types of items from a QIF file: Accounts
Categories
Transactions

The current release does not display check numbers but imports them for future use.

To import as much data as possible, which Liquid ledger skips items in a QIF file that it does not recognize. The current release does not recognize the following types of items:

Budgets
Check addresses
Class’s
Investment accounts
Investment transactions

Memorized transactions
Tax related information

There may be additional QIF elements that Liquid Ledger does not support. If migrating QIF data from another financial application, you should review your Liquid Ledger document after importing.

A ledger is where you record the financial activity for all your accounts, such as entering transactions, tracking incoming and expenses, and recording the transfer of funds between accounts.

In a manual accounting system, a ledger is typically a looseleaf binder, where such pages record the activity of a single account. For example, a ledger might contain a page for each of your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, or any other asset, liability, in combat, or expense.

In Liquid Ledger, each document maintains a ledger, which you update from the Ledger window. The Ledger window allows you to quickly switch between accounts, like flipping through the pages of a loose-leaf ledger. Additionally, you can view the same ledger across separate windows; for example, you might open a new ledger window for each of your account.

When you transfer funds between accounts at your bank, you can quickly update your corresponding local ledger accounts to reflect the change.

You can create a new account when you wish to keep a record of changes to an individual asset reliability, such as a bank or credit card account, or when you wish to create a new category for tracking a type of income or expense.

If you hold an investment trading account with a financial institution, you can manage the various components of that account as a separately with ledger account asset account. If you’re trading account has multiple cash balances, perhaps one for each of the currencies in which to trade, you can create foreign currency accounts for each cash balance.

Asset and liability accounts help you track what you own and what you owe.

You can use asset accounts to record the activity of your bank accounts, record the value of your collectibles, musical equipment, or your car, track the value of your investments, or remember how much you’ve lent to a friend

You can use liability accounts to record the activity of your credit card accounts and keep track of loans.

As for me, I’ll likely continue using my pen and paper accounting method, but if you like computerized personal finance management and use OS X, Liquid Ledger is well worth a look.

System requirements:
• Liquid Ledger requires a Macintosh running Mac OS X 10.1 or later.

Liquid Ledger 1.0 for Mac OS X is currently available for $40 USD, as a download from http://www.liquidledger.com. It includes a 30-day, money-back guarantee.

For help using Liquid Ledger, open the application and choose Liquid Ledger Help from the Help menu. For technical support or to download the latest software updates, visit the Liquid Ledger Web site at:
http://www.LiquidLedger.com

ASCII Codes

From Jess Girard

Hi Charles:

I have the unhappy feeling that I’m far, far from being the first to ask this “Newbie” question, but here goes anyway.

On a PC one can produce just about any ASCII character by holding down the ALT key while inputting a 3- or 4-digit string using the numeric keypad. That seems to work in essentially any Windows App.

Is there some (easy!) equivalent for Macs? I have read a bunch about Unicode but it seems quite complex and difficult to understand by comparison.

I’m running a 400MHz PowerBook “Titanium” mostly under OS X.

Thanks in advance for your consideration.

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore

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