ClearCheckbook is proud to announce the launch of Version 3 of the site. This version upgrade comes with many new features, an updated look, and the ability to become a Premium member.
To start, we'll tell you about the Premium Membership. A Premium Membership gives you access to some new and exciting features such as the ability to view all transactions that were edited and deleted and gives you the power to restore them. The Premium Membership also displays the running balance on the Account Summary page and gives you the ability to estimate Future Balances. The Premium membership costs $4 per month, but you can also purchase multiple months at a time at a lower cost. We do want to emphasize the fact that the site will always remain free for you to sign up and use. However, we believe that offering a Premium membership is a great way to help grow the site and keep the site competitive for both free and premium members. To learn more about the Premium Membership, check out the
premium information page.
Some of the new features added to the site are the new Dashboard that replaces the Account Summary page. Here you can quickly add transactions, view reports, check out your spending limits, view upcoming reminders and recurring transactions and more. Rather have the old Account Summary back? That's fine too, it's as easy as clicking a link on the Summary page. You can now add transactions from any page without actually leaving the page. This will make it easy to quickly enter your transactions while browsing other parts of the site. The reports have also seen an extensive overhaul. The look of the reports have been greatly improved over the previous version of the site. You can also dynamically compare your spending categories against each other in a new report. We now give you the ability to mass delete transactions by clicking on a checkbox next to each transaction you want removed. If you're a premium member, you can also use this method to mass edit transactions.
If you're curious about how to use some of the new features of the site, check out the
tour page. We have some videos that walk you through some of the key features of the site.
The iPhone and iPod touch webapp has also been upgraded and now has the complete set of features the normal site has. You can learn more about the mobile site by going to the
mobile page.
There are still a few things we will be slowly launching over the next few weeks. One of the main new features will be the ability to view the site in different languages. We have several people helping to translate the site into various languages and when we receive those back, we will put them up.
We encourage you to check out the site and see all the new features first hand.
Thanks!
The ClearCheckbook Team
The Account Overviews gadget will list the balances for all of your accounts.
betapaul:
Mint has $18 million dollars in funding. I'm one guy who has a full time job and, until today, made no money from the site other than donations. Please be patient.
anijhenry:
We're still working on updating the OSX widget and the iGoogle gadget.
james.enloe
In response to the comment about deleting not working, it does work. there was just a glitch with the upgrade that caused the delete button to be disabled.
Dottiepo:
This is an IE6 bug only it seems. We are working on fixing it.
Functional sites like Craigslist have never been updated. They don't use one bit of AJAX. It's blue links, black text, white background. It's simple and it works. I am in favor of AJAX and found it useful on the old side but this overkill. The new site is cluttered and results in more clicks and shows me less of an overview. I was hoping that this was just first day jitters and I would quickly adapt to the new site.
I am still hoping but I am very concerned that we lost a great thing in favor of premium features and AJAX mania.
Keep up the great work!!!! :)
Adding Transaction - Description.
When I add new transactions, the autofill for the description isn't working correctly. To get it to fill in, I need to make the description different, the drop down doesn't fill in the field. It is leaving it blank.
Dottiepo:
This is an IE6 bug only it seems. We are working on fixing it.
***Actually the one little bug that dottiepo found is also not working for me and I am using Safari on an Apple Imac. I manually have to type the entry into the field b/c auto fill is not working today after the upgrade.
Other than that...everything is working very well!
Thanks
Now having all categories shown on one chart is completely useless. It is impossible to differentiate categories, plus there is no way to see the associated $ amounts.
I do not mind paying for the premium version to be able to look at the last year data, but not having this feature with bar charts would be a deal breaker for me.
So, is there a way for you to split the bar chart by the categories again, as in the previous version of the software?
Thanks,
Mirela
Thanks.
And thank you so much for all of your hard work on this new and improved version!
I have 3 suggestions:
1. On the Dashboard page, allow us to have three columns instead of just two. It seems to be a better use of space. And then....
2. Allow us to have Latest Transactions gadgets for each account we have (or at least 3 accounts). That way we can see an overview of everything at once.
3. Finally, simply put the Delete Transaction button at the top of the Summary page. Currently, it's only at the bottom and I bet some people don't realize it's there
Great work! :)
I have been very happy, and publicly have endorsed your vision. Your efforts are appreciated. You have (and I am grateful for) helped free me of unnecessary, crushing debt – this is NOT an exaggeration.
However the upgrade appears to me to be more cluttered and complicated than need be, just the opposite of what attracted me to site in the first place. I'm not going to go storming off in a huff, but I am disappointed in the direction your service to the financial community seems to be headed. I would like to respectfully request that users be allowed a "V2" version to be available. I am aware that I am, as a free user, entirely at your mercy.
Thanks to YOU Brandon I am indeed enjoying a prosperous, merry holiday and I wish nothing less than the same for you and yours.
Jim
The bad news, which I think can be fixed reasonably easily, is from a heueristical user interface perspective.
With a well designed application, you shouldn't need to think too much about where to find the different pages. But V3 just seems quite illogically laid out ... as if the UI was designed by a programmer (which, I guess it was). The expectation then is that the user has a lot of patience (from some blog comments, I think that is not always the case).
If you can marry your technical capabilities with some good UI design - then you will have an awesome killer web application on your hands.
So, overall it seems like 2 steps forward and 1 step back. But, still, that is progress ... and I'm sure there's more to come.