The Money Pilot story
About 10 years ago I created a spreadsheet workbook to help me manage my finances. It consisted of tabs that functioned as transaction registers for each of my accounts, a list of bills with due dates, a list of pay days for the next few years, and a tab that pulled data from them all to put together a financial plan. The goal was to help me know how much money I had at a given moment and how much of that was earmarked for currently due bills, giving me the amount of cash I could safely spend and still pay the bills on time. Over the years the spreadsheet evolved, and I was able to automate most of the maintenance with excel macros.
When I got my first iPhone, I immediately wanted to find a way to move the spreadsheet to my iPhone. This seemed like the best place for it to be used in my daily life, adding transactions to the registers as I spent my money and paid the bills. I looked for apps that could replace my spreadsheet. I found some that where similar, but ultimately not really what I wanted. When Apple finally released Numbers for iOS a few years ago, I thought I finally had a solution. I redesigned and ported my spreadsheet to Numbers, but in the process lost all my excel macro automation. I made do with this compromise for a while but it was ultimately too frustrating. Finally I decided I would make my own app. Money Pilot is the result of many months work on the app, and years worth of experience developing the concept through various incarnations of the spreadsheet.
Money Pilot is the financial record keeper and bill planner that finally replaces my spreadsheet. It tracks expenses in your accounts and plans bills around your own unique pay day schedule. By combining these 2 key features, Money Pilot tells you how much money you have, how much you currently owe in bills, and how much you’ll have left over after you pay them. It also tells you what bills are due in the next few weeks, and plans them out for the whole year, grouped by pay days. By making a native app I was also able to bring back lots of the automation I had lost. The result is that you can do some serious micromanaging of your money without having to do all of the micromanaging yourself.
Money Pilot is currently a solid 1.0 release, but far from done. I have a lot of plans for the future, and a lot of features that didn’t make it out in 1.0. I look forward to making it the best money manager and bill planner available for iOS, and eventually the Mac. I hope you think as highly of Money Pilot as I do. If not drop me a line and tell me what’s missing for you.