FinanceFerret
About
FinanceFerret is the working name for an (eventually) open source personal finance manager application currently being developed by Woozle.
Goals
- To avoid shortcomings in existing money manager software
- To minimize the "setup curve", i.e. the amount of preparatory work needed before any useful amounts of data can be entered
- To provide all basic functionality needed for the following:
- Tracking and balancing one's bank accounts, credit cards, and other basic types of money accounts
- Tracking debts and loans involving one or more other parties of varying levels of disorganization (they might or might not send you regular statements or even reliable itemizations)
- To make data entry as painless as possible:
- Easy identification of redundantly-entered transactions -- so you can Just Start Typing instead of worrying about where you left off last time
- Deferred data massaging -- so you can Just Start Typing, and worry about assigning proper accounts and categories to things later; the program should keep track of incomplete data massaging so you can take care of it when you have time
Naming
Googling for "financeferret" did not turn up any apparent trademarks. The domain name "financeferret.com" was registered in 2006, but as of 2008-08-17 the associated web site still showed it as "coming soon" -- possibly a domain squatter.
From this, I determined that the name is more or less available for this use. "financeferret.net" and "financeferret.org" were available as of 2008-08-17, but it didn't seem worth the trouble and expense to register them (enough just-for-the-name domains sitting around sucking $12/year out of my bank account already).
When I checked again on 2009-06-06, financeferret.com had become available, so I registered it... but later let the registration expire. Amazingly, it has not yet been snarfed up by a domain squatter (as of 2011-09-27).
Status
The software was working reasonably well (albeit with many rough edges) as a Microsoft Access 97 program (written in VBA). I have ported most of it to PHP/MySQL as a MediaWiki plugin, and the basic functions are now working and were usable at one point, though I think changes in the underlying libraries have caused some problems which now need to be fixed.
Problems with the data design, plus some additional opportunities to make this system useful as a library rather than just a standalone module, are leading me to abandon trying to fix the current bugs and start work on /version 2.
Early documentation for the MS Access version is on HypertWiki.