I’m just about starting to use a finance app on my Mac. Before, I was using just Pennies for iPhone, which is a simple budgetting app, allowing you to save transactions on the go. This is especially handy if you don’t pull out your credit card for every payment. Pennies has been a great app, but it’s not the most powerful app in the world. Finally though, some good solutions on the Mac now have iPhone counterparts.

Squirrel is one of those that caught my attention.

Nuts On The Desktop

The first thing that stuck me about Squirrel is how clean it is. It has an iTunes-like sidebar, and it feels very Mac-ish. It’s extremely simple and fast to enter transactions. I wasn’t surprised that it won an Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X Leopard Student Product in 2008.

You can add multiple accounts. Accounts can be set as cash, savings, checking, credit cards, or friend. I don’t know about your friends, but I don’t really store funds in my friends. Perhaps you could use it to transfer funds to “friend” for loans, and keep track of who you owe money to, or who owes you money.

Entering new transactions is kept simple. After creating a new transaction, you edit all the transaction data in a single pane at the bottom of the window. There is a spot to enter a transaction description, but not a payee field. Transactions can be put into categories, and tagged for searching later. Personally I think you could get by with only categories or tags, but they’re both there if you need them. You can then view your transactions in a list view, or in a graph view. The graph will show how your account balance has fluctuated over time. These results can be filtered by all, incoming, and outgoing.

The second section of your sidebar is for management. Squirrel gives you reports on your spending. You’ll get pie charts, showing a breakdown of previous activity. These reports can be exported as PDFs for archival purposes. You can also set budgets that are based on categories or tags. I used budgets to keep track of how much I spend on videogames, since that’s where all my extra cash seems to go. The last part of the management options are scheduled transactions. These can be set up to occur at custom intervals, and make it quite easy to keep track of payments for say, rent, gym memberships, or renewing that oh so valuable MobileMe account you have.

Syncing Nuts To The iPhone

Where Squirrel really got my attention was its iPhone counterpart. As I said before, I love Pennies, and to have my account info while on the go is essential for me. Squirrel’s iPhone app isn’t fully featured, but it’s functional. With it, you can add transactions to existing accounts from the Mac version, view budgets you’ve set up on the desktop, and lastly, you can edit categories as well. It’s a little lacking, but it lets you add transactions, which is what’s most important. It’s a free download from the app store.

Nuts Worth Their Weight in Gold

There’s a lot to like about Squirrel. Its clean interface and ease of use make it extremely attractive. My only gripe with the desktop version was the inability to use multiple currencies. The app uses whatever currency your system is set to use. I was able to have my Japanese accounts display in yen, but my American accounts also showed up in yen. It’s usuable, but just strange seeing $800 show up as ￥800, which is about $8. The developer assured me that multiple currencies will be supported in the future, most likely in time for a 1.0 release. I also wish the iPhone app allowed for creation of accounts, and allowed you to edit budgets. As it stands, you can only view budgets on the iPhone.

The app is priced at $20 ‘during development’ (it’s at v0.7.4) and will increase once it hits 1.0. You can download a trial version here. It allows for two accounts and up to 50 transactions.