Cash Tracker is a tool I built to help answer these questions more quickly than pencil-and-paper ever could. Cash Tracker not a budgeting application per-se. Instead, it begins by answering the most basic of questions—how much money will I have in a month, 6 months, or a year—in the simplest way possible.

Cash Tracker Online is a first step at bringing the tool I made for myself to the general public. Getting started is easy! First, go to www.cashtrackeronline.com (a secure website that will keep your information safe and private) and click the button that says ‘Register Now’. The site will guide you through registering and “tracking” your first bank account.

Once you have your first account being “tracked”, you can start adding recurrences (these are usually either bills or pay checks). The site will automatically start predicting your financial future using projected data points (such as your projected high and low balances over the next year). As you add more income and expenses, your “Account Balance Over Time” graph will allow you to visualize your financial state over the next year.

In the next few weeks I will publish some more articles showing just how powerful Cash Tracker Online can be. In the meantime, head on over to www.cashtrackeronline.com to take your finances for a spin!

• Improved interface:
  • Allows you to select the recording area from a list of pre-defined options
  • Allows you to move the window around to “frame” your recording area
  • The window containing the recording area stays on top, so you always know what you’re recording
• AVI files are now compressed using the WM3 video codec, resulting in far smaller file size
• Frame rate is now throttled at 25 frames-per-second, resulting in somewhat-smaller file size
• Ability to overwrite files when saving.
• Progress bar shows save progress while exporting the AVI file.

If you already have Screen Tracker, you should get the update the next time you use it. If you don’t have it yet, just click the Screen Tracker link under “Downloads” or go to the Screen Tracker page to install the latest release.

1. Progress bar when saving the .avi file (a piece of cake, but time-consuming to implement)
2. Use a compressed format (the current file-sizes are enormous!)
3. A resizable “recording area” instead of the X, Y, Height, and Width boxes.
4. A “quality” radio button that increases performance at the expense of frame-rate (and maybe even the image quality)

The Roadmap
I believe I am the only person who uses Cash Tracker on a consistent basis, but I’ve found the application so useful that I’m going to plow ahead until I’m satisfied. So, for the Cash Tracker 1.0 release I plan to unveil some big new features. Plus, I’ve determined to create an online version of the tool. Here are the steps needed to proceed to that point:

1. Add most or all of the features on the upcoming features list
2. Acquire a catchy web domain name and SSL certificate
3. Possibly re-brand Cash Tracker under a different name for the web (i.e. whatever catchy domain name I find)
4. Port the Windows project to a data-driven website project using ASP.NET and SQL Server technologies

Contributions
If you’d like to contribute to the project, just drop me an email; I’ll be happy to set up a source control server. The project doesn’t really need funding beyond a web domain and SSL certificate purchase, but an extra pair of coding hands would definitely accelerate the release timeline.

It’s really rough; I’m giving it a version of 0.7. I don’t have any error handling in place, so if you put the wrong values into the tracker it will probably scream at you and then die. If you’re not a geek you probably want to wait at least until version 0.9 gets released. Until then, I’m probably not going to settle on a reliable file type, so .tfx files saved before 0.9 probably won’t be compatible with later versions.

For a current list of features, check the Cash Tracker’s main page.