dale lane

I’ve used Microsoft Money for years – ever since I started using MS Money 97 at Uni. I can’t imagine how I’d keep on top of finances without it.

The tricky bit is having to enter transactions into the software every time you buy something – something which lends itself perfectly to a mobile solution. Rather than waiting until you next get to your computer, enter the transaction immediately by jotting a quick note on your mobile.

I bought a copy of Spb Finance. It’s almost perfect…. except that the syncing between PDA and PC sucks*. I’ve tried everything to get it to work – including working with the support guys at Spb, collecting trace and log files for them and multiple re-installs in different configurations. No joy – syncing is still unreliable, has corrupted my Money file a few times, and even when it works it has a habit of chewing up all remaining CPU cycles on the computer, making my ThinkPad run scarily hot.

So I thought I’d have a go at writing something for myself.

I don’t normally blog about every Windows Mobile app I throw together, mainly because it’s…. well, basically fairly trivial. Drag-and-drop programming.

But this one was a bit interesting because of the data I wanted to collect.

After some fruitless Googling, it seems that there is no API for getting at my Money data. This surprised me… after writing all sorts of bits of pieces using Internet Explorer, and a bunch of MS Office apps, in a variety of languages, I kinda assumed that Microsoft would have published an API for accessing the database behind MS Money.

But apparently not. Spoilsports. 🙁

So I’ve gone for a compromise – by creating Open Financial Exchange (OFX) files. OFX is a data-stream format for exchanging financial information. Typically, you download OFX files from your online banking service, and import it into Microsoft Money. But I don’t see any reason why I can’t use this to get my information into the app.

I found the specification for the format of OFX files on the OFX website. Not the most user-friendly doc in the world, but the information is all in there to write an app which generates OFX statements.

I don’t think it’s really meant for this sort of thing… it’s really meant for a more definitive statement of account transactions than as a way of importing user input.

For example, the OFX specification requires the current balance at the time of the statement was generated. As I’m talking about doing a one-way sync of PDA to computer, I can’t really do this – so am just setting this to 0 and hoping it doesn’t cause MS Money any problems.

The other issue is that the OFX spec doesn’t include categories – the bit that says how the money was spent, such as “Groceries” or “Gas bill”. On the plus side, this means one less box needed for my app. It saves a bit of data entry for each transaction, and frees up space to make all the other controls a bit bigger.

And Microsoft Money does a neat job of guessing categories for transactions based on the shop name (e.g. transactions at “Esso” get prefilled with a category of “Petrol”). So it’s not all bad.

On the plus side, including the account number and sort code in the OFX file lets Microsoft Money match up transactions with the right account in MS Money.

Other than that, it was just a job of creating an interface that minimises effort and doesn’t need a stylus (chunky date boxes that you can either tap on – tap on the top to roll it up, on the bottom to roll it down – or just use the D-Pad… big finger-jabbable on-screen number buttons when you tap on the value box… that sorta thing), and rejigging the buttons around if the screen is rotated.

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* Oh – about SPB Finance… I should be fair. Although I can’t help being a little annoyed at paying money for software that I can’t actually use, it’s probably not entirely their fault.

My money file is old – it’s been upgraded twice (from MS Money 97 to 2001, and then again to 2005), so who knows what random bits of crap got left in the file that don’t conform exactly to the current MS Money spec.

And the file is big – it has all of my finance records since 1999. I don’t like to have to archive older stuff, because it’s just hassle. So maybe their solution just isn’t suited to trying to juggle a data source that big. For all I know, a new clean file that isn’t 20 megs in size might sync perfectly.

As an aside… I wonder how SPB get their access to the MS Money database. Reverse engineering? Or do they just ask Microsoft nicely? 😉

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 10:10 pm and is filed under code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.