IGG Developers’ Blog

I am back once again to talk about the new reporting engine in iBank. But before I do that I want to recap where we have been, and to give you a preview of were we are going. In “Too Many Secrets,” I started to describe why we wanted better reporting within iBank and what our overall goals for reporting were. I outlined four things that we wanted to achieve:

In my last post, “Image Is Everything,” I talked about how the new reporting engine lays out graphs, pie charts, text and tables to make beautiful, readable reports. Some of the feedback from those blog posts made me realize that I had neglected to mention two overarching design goals: simplicity and speed.

At IGG, we are not focusing on simplicity and speed solely for reports; we have made those goals a part of everything we’ve been doing, starting with the development and launch of iBank Mobile, and in iBiz 4 as well. We are constantly looking at how new features, or changes to existing features, affect the simplicity and speed of the product. iBank for the Mac has not seen as much of this yet, but that is changing. As I am talking about reports and the changes that are coming, please be assured that they will be simpler and faster.

So on to today’s topic: how to set up reports. Reports are all about answering people’s questions about their finances. We’re doing this in a way that offers more options to specify what accounts, categories and dates to include in a given report.

Let’s take a typical question that my wife asks: “What did we spend our money on last month?” (By this my wife is making the point that I spend too much on coffee.)

In the current version of iBank (3.5.5), I would create a new “Quick Summary Chart” and then select “Last Month” from the date pop-up, iBank would then fill in the dates 2-1-2010 to 2-28-2010 (PS3 thinks this is a leap year, but I digress). I would then name my chart and press “OK.” Now I have a new chart with the data I wanted — not too bad. But there are some problems. First, what happens when time passes? Next month when I want to know where we spent our money, I will look at this report and it will still have the date range for February… not what I want. So now I have to delete the report and create a new one so that iBank can apply the new date range for March… not practical.

But now with the new reporting engine we have smart dates. If you choose “Last Month” then the report will always be the past month relative to today. We have also added a new set of smart dates so that you really can have the data you want at your fingertips (you can also select “Custom Dates” if you want to have dates that are fixed and not relative to today). Here is the current working set of smart dates:

As I look at this report for last month’s expenses, it shows me taxes deducted from my paycheck, my mortgage payments and other expense that are fixed month over month. In fact, these expenses dominate the pie chart in iBank since they are by far my biggest expenses. But these are not really expenses I am interested in. For the most part, I can’t change these month to month, and from my wife’s point of view they make the coffee look insignificant. So I want to remove these expenses and just track my discretionary spending (and coffee, which some view as non-discretionary).

In iBank 3 this is fairly easy: I just delete them. The issue arises when I add a new category to my data file. For example, my son just started T-ball. If I add a category for T-ball expenses, any existing report would not have this new category in it. This is because iBank 3.5 uses a model where you have to specify all of the categories and accounts that you want to include in each report. It is like having a guest list for your categories — if a category is not on the list, it can’t come in.

With this new reporting engine we offer three ways to include categories and accounts. The first way is the one iBank 3.5 uses. The second way is an open door policy with an exclusion list: with this approach we include all the categories and/or accounts by default, and you can specify which ones to exclude. This would be like a bouncer at a bar were you let everyone in except for the people who are on the “do not serve” list. This is the method that I use most often.

The final method is for more advanced users: the rules method. This lets you specify which categories and/or accounts to use based on rules; for example “only taxable accounts” or “only expense categories”.  This is like telling the bouncer at the bar to only let in nice looking, rich people. All of this sounds complex, but I assure you that it is a very simple interface. First, we have pulled all of these options out of the main reporting view and put them in a pop-up window. You access this window by double-clicking on the report. This is the report settings, and from it you can change the date range, currency, name, and accounts and categories to include. Here is an example for the spending report.

I hope you can see that we have added a ton of options on how you can configure your reports and at the same time, simplified the UI for doing so. Next time I will be taking about another consistently requested feature: the ability to drill down into the data, get more detail, and even edit it. In the meantime, we hope to hear more of your feedback.