Overview
Introduction
Family Finance Manager is a software application, currently available only as a Windows 10 application, that records financial assets and liabilities and tracks income and expenditure. This quite simple capability is core to healthy financial management because it allows for the analysis of past financial behaviour and thereby enables both prediction and adjustment of your financial trajectory to best achieve your, and your family’s, goals.
Famliy Finance Manager’s design, both in terms of user interface and data model, has been strongly influenced by Microsoft Money, a popular personal finance management package first released in 1991, and eventually discontinued in 2009. In fact Family Finance Manager is probably the only current modern software product that can directly import MS Money data and thereby preserve the historical financial data which is essential for accurate forecasting.
We have been using MS Money since 1997 and have found the user interface to be particularly straightforward and intuitive to use. Most of the functionality provided was directly relevant to managing our own, and our family’s, financial affairs and we have never been tempted away to another competitive product, partially because of familiarity with MS Money, but mainly because of not wanting to move our data to a third-party cloud, to pay a subscription and end up locked-in to a third-party vendor.
As a result, it has been an ongoing quest in our spare time (for probably the last 10 year) to come up with a viable replacement for MS Money. A key requirement was that it should be able to import the original data and thereby preserve our historical financial data. This key objective has proved somewhat illusive. Our initial attempts could import MS Money report data but we couldn’t get all the data we wanted and it required a clunky manual process to generate the reports. This conspired to induce friction in moving away from MS Money and as a result we continued to live with the limitations and carry on our development work in our spare time.
Happily this changed when, through random surfing, we came accross the work from Hung Le and their Sunriise project on SourceForge, and more recently Sunriise2-misc on GitHub, and the suggestion that the Jackcess library could read MS Money files. Following further research and development we managed to establish a .NET module to read MS Money data and thereby we had a route to use our .NET and Windows development skills to design and deliver a truly viable replacement for MS Money :-).
Guiding Principles
Having painted a picture of this project’s origins, it is worth taking a moment to consider the guiding principles we are trying to adopt in producing a finance management software package. It might seem quite strange to consider that there should be a philosophical approach to software development but the nature of software is such that design choices can have an affect on the user’s well being and as such it seems right to be up front and explain how we address these responsibilities.
At a fundamental level, we believe that our customers, and ourselves, have at least the following rights with regards to the use of software:
- Right to privacy
- Right to chose
- Right to repair
These particular principles are discussed in further detail in the sections below. But overall this guides us towards the use of industry standard local (machine or network) databases for the storage of data, minimising the network connection required to operate the software and towards the provision of source code through an open source project.
Right to privacy
As everyone is becoming aware of in the 21st century, your digital footprint can be, and is being, exploited in increasingly sophisticated ways by third-parties to target, and to possibly manipulate, you in ways not necessarily aligned with your personal objectives. The greatest opportunity for exploitation occurs when seemingly incongruous data is aggregated and cross-referenced which enables a much wider picture of your personal behaviour to be established than you might expect.
As you can imagine, a full aggregation of your personal financial behaviour across multiple financial institutions could easily be used to target you and even though lengthy contractual agreements might set out seemingly appropriate restrictions on how your data might be used it seems increasingly unlikely that third-party organisations would be able to resist exploiting the data.
At a fundamental level, we believe that we all have a right to privacy, that any digital footprint we create is our own and that the right to analyse and benefit from that data is inherently our own and ours to control. To that end, we therefore believe that any personal data we receive should only be through a clear opt-in agreement and that we should minimise, as much as possible, the data we might receive or collect from you.
A consequence of this approach is that we believe there must be a version of the software where all the data is under your control without there being any mechanism for us to exploit it without your consent. We have concluded therefore that there must be a workable version of the software that uses a local-only database, without any Internet access at all, such that there the risk of privacy leakage is minimised as far as possible.
Right to chose
Another right that we wish to support is the customer’s right to choose whether they stay with us and our product range or whether they wish to move elsewhere. Within the computer industry there seems to be many cases where vendor lock-in seeks to actively discourage chosing a competitor product by making it difficult to move the data across. We experienced this ourselves through using Microsoft Money and feel that it is akin to locking our, and it is OUR data, up such that we can only access it through the vendor’s tools. Combine that with some kind of subscription model and you are placed in a difficult position, you either stay and continue to pay or the only alternative is to walk away and lose a rich data history that you might have accumulated.
One solution we see is to use an industry standard, and accessible, database to provide storage of the data. By adopting this approach it means that at any point in time you have access to your data through alternative tools meaning that you should always have a means by which you can move your data to another supplier. We’re not saying that it will necessarily be easy and might require investment of your own to achieve a migration but it does ensure that there is a techical route thereby guaranteeing you are never fully locked in.
Right to repair
Another consideration that has started to appear within the computer hardware world is the right to repair hardware yourselves. The argument is from both moral and sustainability perspectives, in that having purchased equipment you have a right to make adjustments/repairs to it yourself and that manufacturers should not actively engineer their products to prevent that being feasible. This is another kind of vendor lock-in. Within the world of computer software the discussion is slightly more complex. Firstly, with most software you don’t actually own it, instead have a license to use it, in perpuity (within the terms of the agreement) if you make a one-off payment or only as long as you pay in a subscription model. And with software, in reality you can only modify it / repair it if you have access to the source code and the data. And in general, if it is a closed-source proprietary product you have no ability to modify it at all, whereas with open source software you are free to modify it as you require though you would obviously invalidate any warranty and probably support agreements.
For this reason, we believe that the only valid way to deliver software products is to provide a means by which the customer can access the source code and make their own repairs and modifications. This also sits well with the principle of providing access to your data using alternative tools. There are also other benefits to adopting the open-source approach that we will cover further in a later chapter.
Key Features
Having painted a picture of the origins of this project, it is probably worth taking a moment to consider carefully the key objectives as this helps understand the design and how this project could evolve in the future.
Overall, for us, the headline objective was to provide a replacement financial management for our aging Microsft Money product, but there were also other issues that we wanted to address:
- Replace Microsoft Money
- Use standard database technology to store the data.
- Support multiple concurrent users.
Privacy
All the data held in your copy of Family Finance Manager is stored completely under your control on your local disk and it is not shared with anybody else. We are extremely aware that the aggregation of financial data in a system like Family Finance Manager is extremely sensitive and as a result we have adopted a cloud-free policy where all data is stored locally. We specifically do not store full account numbers in the system and recommend that you keep separate records to enable you to transact with the various financial providers that you use.
Limitations
As part of our policy of absolute transparency, it is important that you understand the limitations to the current release so you can determine whether this application is right for you. We expect many of these limitations to be removed in future releases but as of writing you should know:
- Single Currency
- At this point we do not support currencies other than British Pounds Sterling (GBP). Though the database allows for different accounts having different currencies we do not have the functionality to map currency values nor to record exchange rates so we cannot recommend this product if you use many different currrencies.
- Single User
- The very nature of Windows 10 applications is that they store their data locally on the user’s disk. This means that unless a server is available to service the requests the application is inherently single-user, meaning that only one user can access the data at a time. We are working on a lightweight server to enable you to share the data with another family member in a secure way, but this is not yet ready for general availability.
Requirements
Family Finance Manager is in the early stages of development and as a result we have not yet managed to test all computer configurations and it is likely that there are some configurations where the software is not fully usable. This section details the recommended requirements though we would welcome feedback if you chose to use the software on a different configuration and will look to make changes if at all possible.
- Windows 10
- The minimum supported version of Windows 10 is version 1903 (build 18362) which was released to the public in April 2019. Some of the functionality used by Family Finance Manager requires this version and our recommendation is that all users should keep their computers up-to-date as much as possible. As a result, going forward, it is quite likely that this minimum version will increase and we do strongly advise that you make sure your computer is updated to the latest version where possible.
- HD Screen
- Our current screen design assumes a standard High Definition screen (1920 x 1080). The application will work at other resolutions but we haven’t yet completed full testing so we can’t guarantee the quality on other screen sizes.
- Physical Keyboard
- Similar to the screen size recommendation, we haven’t yet fully tested the application with on-screen keyboards and as a result our recommendation is that you need a physical keyboard to use the software effectively.
- Mouse
- We haven’t yet managed to test the application using a touch-only device and as a result we recommend that you have a mouse (trackpad or physical mouse) to ensure you can use the software without issue.