Modeless Liquid Ledger Personal Finance Software (Mac)

by CSDC

Product Features

• Personal finance software with comprehensive set of accounting tools
• Track banking and credit card activity; setup bill-pay reminders
• Balance checkbook; generate reports and graphs; streamlined user interface
• Forgiving workflow with unlimited undo and redo; multiple currency support
• Double-entry accounting engine; AppleScript support; familiar terminology

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000EA9U2A
• Item model number: 0042-0150
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 18, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,599 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Personal finance software for Max OS X, Liquid Ledger can help you analyze monthly spending and find cash you never knew you had. It offers a comprehensive set of accounting tools to help you track banking and credit card activity, balance your checkbook, setup reminders to pay bills, generate reports and graphs, and more. With modern features such as Multiple Currency support, the ability to import account activity downloaded from financial institutions, and over a dozen time-saving features, a few minutes each week is all it takes to start feeling more confident about how you manage your money.

Features:

• Robust Accounting Model
  Liquid Ledger draws its strength from a modern double-entry accounting engine that ensures the accuracy and integrity of your financial data, while establishing a solid foundation for future development.
• International Appeal
  Liquid Ledger works equally well for all Mac users no matter where you live in the world. Monetary amounts are properly formatted for your home currency; you can track accounts denominated in home and foreign currencies; and, your date and number preferences are automatically loaded from the International System Preferences of Mac OS X.
• Large Document Support
  The Liquid Ledger interface remains responsive even when your documents contain thousands of transactions, so you can easily accumulate and manage many years of financial history.
• Support for Small Displays
  Liquid Ledger helps you optimize your workflow when working on an iBook or a PowerBook, where screen space can be at a premium. Instead of filling your screen with separate windows for each account, you can use a single Ledger window to navigate among the accounts in your document using the handy Accounts drawer.
• Hierarchical Presentation of Data
  Liquid Ledger can organize transactions into customizable groups, so you can hide past transactions and more easily focus on recent activity.
• AppleScript Support
  Liquid Ledger is AppleScript-aware, enabling you to extend the product’s functionality by writing your own AppleScript or AppleScript Studio applications.
• Easy Installation and Setup
  Liquid Ledger installs effortlessly, and if you are migrating from another financial application, you can quickly import your existing financial data using the Quicken Interchange Format (QIF).
• Familiar Terminology
  Liquid Ledger is anchored in real-world objects and uses familiar banking terminology, like asset, liability, deposit, and withdrawal, so it’s easy to learn and use.
• Forgiving Workflow
  Liquid Ledger encourages you to explore its capabilities by offering unlimited undo and redo. You never have to worry about making mistakes since even the most complex tasks, like importing account activity or deleting accounts, can all be undone.
• Streamlined User Interface
  Liquid Ledger adopts many axioms of user interface design in order to optimize your workflow and make the product a pleasure to use. Special attention is given to keyboard navigation so you can quickly enter dozens of transactions without ever lifting your fingers off the keyboard. You can also customize various user interface elements such as table columns and toolbars to suit your individual tastes and needs.
• Quality and Reliability
  Liquid Ledger has an excellent track record for ensuring the accuracy and integrity of your financial data, and each new release undergoes extensive testing to minimize bugs and ensure application stability.
• Built Exclusively for Mac OS X
  Liquid Ledger is built on the native Cocoa framework of Mac OS X and takes full advantage of the Aqua look and feel. It delivers everything you expect from a Macintosh application and is truly a "must have" for every Macintosh user.

Product Description

Liquid Ledger is a personal accounting solution that can help you analyse monthly spending and find cash you never knew you had. It offers a comprehensive set of accounting tools to help you track banking and credit card activity, balance your chequebook, setup reminders to pay bills, generate reports and graphs, and more. With modern features such as Multiple Currency support, the ability to import account activity downloaded from financial institutions, and over a dozen time-saving features, a few minutes each week is all it takes to start feeling more confident about how you manage your money.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars About the buggiest piece of software I've ever used, November 1, 2006

By 

Chris Caillouet (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Modeless Liquid Ledger Personal Finance Software (Mac) (CD-ROM)

The only reason I bought Liquid Ledger was that Quicken for Macintosh got such horrible reviews on Amazon, but now I wish I'd taken my chances. I was converting from a PC to Mac and needed financial software to take the place of Quicken. My experiences with Quicken for Windows were all fairly positive; however, with LL, it's been nothing but frustration and headaches.

First off, it didn't want to play nice with my exports from Quicken, so I had to try over and over to find a format that it would accept, and even then things didn't translate cleanly. Beyond that initial frustration with getting my existing data loaded, I just find Liquid Ledger to be very unfriendly and not at all intuitive - things are not grouped logically under the menus, nor are the functions named in a way that makes a lot of sense. I understand that most software comes with a learning curve, but I'm a pretty sharp guy with a good deal of computer savvy (been working with computers and various operating systems professionally for a good 16 years now), and I find LL confounding.

My biggest gripe about it is the bugs. For one, things rarely sort correctly. If I click on a column header, I expect it to sort my data by the values in that column, and clicking the header again should reverse the sort. However, with LL, if I make a change in a column (e.g. clicking the "cleared" box next to a transaction) and then immediately try to sort on that column, the sort is incorrect; it is as though it does not recognize the modification I just made, and the only remedy is to sort by ANOTHER column first, then sort on the column I originally wanted. UNACCEPTABLE!!!

If I'm on the last transaction that's displayed in the window and tab off the last field, the cursor jumps to the very FIRST transaction. NOT what I would want or expect - how about just going back to the first field of the current transaction???

The most frustrating bug is the disappearing details pane. LL allows you to sub-itemize a transaction in a separate pane on the main window by entering individual line item transactions that comprise the main transaction. I most often use this for tracking transactions on my Visa credit card - I'll have one line item for the total bill, and the details pane allows me to record the individual purchases separately, which I can then use to reconcile my statement when it comes in. So, the details pane works fine, until I decide to toggle to another window or open application. When I do, the details pane is usually gone when I return to LL, and the only way I have found to recover it is to QUIT LL and restart it. Not only does the pane disappear, but the scroll bar on the right edge of the window goes away also, and the transactions generally run past the bottom of the page. In other words, the application becomes all but unusable until I restart it.

Also, I've got years worth of data, but LL absolutely bogs down unless I restrict the transactions to just a month or two. I've never had any issue with this in Quicken.

The "help" within the application is anything but helpful. There are plenty of descriptions of the sorts of things you can ostensibly do with LL, but just try and figure out how to actually accomplish any of those things! The procedural descriptions, if they exist at all, are very well-hidden. The only available customer support appears to be "Online Support Forums," which I take to be a cop-out on the part of Modeless. Let the customers gripe to each other about the buggy product, rather than actually do anything to fix it. The bugs I've noticed are pretty major - and I've submitted my share of bug reports - but in the five months I've used this piece o' c*** there hasn't been a single software update available.

It doesn't surprise me that there's only one other review of this product at the time of this writing. Perhaps LL's reputation is well-known and more people are opting to deal with Quicken for Mac. I certainly wish I had!!!

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Trying the full demo; don't think would buy if had another option, August 26, 2006

By 

Monk (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Modeless Liquid Ledger Personal Finance Software (Mac) (CD-ROM)

I downloaded the full demo from the company website. It is a VERY basic finance tracking software; I don't think that its worth the $80 to buy, but then again, its only competitor, Quicken, has had such bad reviews that I doubt there are any reliable options for personal finance software for the Mac system.

The register is very basic and sometime annoying because if you double click on a name, it assumes you want to change the name and not access the account. Minor annoyance but I think it needs to be mentioned in a review. There is also no place to store the account information (account number, bank routing number, etc) unless you make it part of the account name.

On a larger note, if you focus in on a date range (the only option because cleared and reconned info remains in the screen) a glitch often changes your balance. Caused a lot of panic until I realized it was not my doing. Now I don't trust the program for a real balance; something that you may want in a personal finance program.