Chronicle - Bill Management App Reviews

Add my name to the list of those dissapointed with the bland UI of version 6. Not only does it look awful, it eliminates a feature (I used the colors to discriminate between my wife’s credit cards and mine.) Bland interfaces, reduced feature set, eliminated choices for users - Is this the new normal for software on the Mac??? :(

The new version is not appealing at all. No color icons the layout is too broad across the screen. Bookkeeping is boring enough, at least add a little color. I thought update were suppose to be improvements to an app. Just downloaded it and haven’t had a chance to use it, but right off the bat I don’t like the change. Will comment later on the other aspects of the update.

I like this app and continually use it… it’s really helpful for keeping track over how your electric bill changes over the years, for example. Best of all, you can attach receipts or add confirmation notes for your bills upon logging the payments. Chronicle also used to have vibrant, beautiful icons… now they are monochrome and I don’t like all of the ways the icons are represented… most notably, the “Security” icon used to be a gorgeous camera icon. Now, it’s a monochrome bell (I assume ‘alarm’?) symbol :( I thought about removing 1 star from my initial rating of 5 because of this, but that would mostly be so I can get the developer’s attention on this sad moment - but that’s not right. Reviews are for customers, not developers. I’m going to try browsing his forums and contacting the devs that way. For a new customer, please ignore any bad ratings due to the change of the icon design. You can plainly see the icons in the screenshots above. There is technically nothing wrong with them - it’s just that many reviewers (and I, myself) really liked the older, more colorful icons (even if they probably don’t go with OS X / iOS’s newer UI design since OS X Yosemite).

Update to my previous review-I just completed the 6.0.1 update. I, like the other folks preferred the color icons, but the app is still one of my favorites. It is simple to use, I never forget to pay a bill any longer (especially when updating credit cards and changing them to others with zero percent interest-it can get confusing if you don’t have a good tracking system). The developer has always been extremely friendly and responsive to my questions-it’s unusual to get such a personal touch with most apps. I highly recommend this app to anyone looking for a simple bill tracking/payment app. If you avoid just one late payment fee, the app will have paid for itself. It also allows you take a good view of the upcoming months so you can plan where you might need to save a bit more. I’m not a technical person per se, so the simpler the better for me, and this handy little app has all that I need. I was looking for a simple program to remind me of the various due dates/amounts for upcoming bills. I never did have a good plan for remembering all the various due dates and things that only come up every so often. It was eye opening when entering how many payments I actually make each month, so right off the bat I got a better understanding of where my money is going. I must also admit I like the verbal adulation the app gives when you make a payment :-). I have to say this handy little app gave me a better grip of what I actually have outgoing every month, and love the feeling I get when all the buttons are green meaning I’m all paid up-silly I know, but it works for me. This app is just what I needed-I feel more on top of my bills and managing them in a timely manner.

What a way to start the morning. This new update has ruined my day and probably my life. The gray color they chose for the icons feels like the app is turned off and you need to login to turn it on. This is not the appealing lively gray color that Apple uses on some of their icons. This is not a modern design gray. Please fire your color-blind designer and bring back some color and life to the app.

I know probabily the author will not see my post, but I still want to suggest to have a windows version so that I can also run and sync the great app on my PC and surface pro. Please make this dream becoming true.

I pay for a display and graphics hardware in order to display millions of colors, only to be presented with black and white icons and a user interface that is more retro than modern ???

UPDATE: I reported a small bug and was contacted by the developer within hours - a rare feat of customer service among software developers in this day and age. Keep up the great work guys. I couldn’t recommend you more highly! Chronicle is an intuitive bill management application that allows one to log and track multiple bills of various frequency over the year. Chronicle has all of the features that one would expect, without being overly complex, as some budgeting software can be. Chronicle features calendar reminder integeration, notification center The biggest feature for me personally, is the tight iCloud integration with the iOS version. The iOS version features a Notification Center widget, and by default shows a badge count for any “Due Soon” or past due bills. These don’t go away until the bills are marked as paid, allowing one to stay on top of one’s bills. Linking payment receipts and being able to add past biils (hold the Alt-key to add partial payments) are also big pluses. Having software like this is really a necessity if you have bills that are billed on various cycles. Chronicle breaks down bills by their amount and allows you to see and allocate funds appropriately in a timely manner. I’m a college student in a shared house, and this software allows me to stay on top of collection.

The updated caused a loss of 3 months of payment entries. I contacted support but no response. I really dislike the grayed-out icons which in other programs mean that the item is unavailable. However, Chronicle has been a stable program in the past and worked well for my needs so I’m not giving up on it yet.

I have used this app for years to keep track of my bills. I’m a very busy person and Chronicle has taken all the guess work out of finance management for me. I can honestly say it’s saved me countless dollars in late fees and worry about whether I’ve forgotten / missed a payment. I don’t receive any paper statements from my credit cards and lots of my cards are $0 balance. This app is a clean, systematic way of keeping an eye on my unused credit card accounts in case any mysterious or unexpected charges show up and I end up with a missed payment. Chronicle reminds me to go check all my online credit card accounts every month so I can either make a timely payment or confirm they’re still a $0 balance. It’s also really good for tracking bills that only come around once or twice a year. These bills tend to sneak up on you. But with Chronicle, you can see them coming and plan for the expense accordingly. That being said, please bring back the color icons (or at least allow an option for either)! I didn’t deduct any stars becuase of this change, but I really feel like the colors are an additional tracking for me. I’m a visual person and the bland, monochromatic icons are a bit of a disappointment.

Over the years I’ve tried a lot of bill & finance apps, but there’s always something I don’t like about them. Chronicle has the features I want (and then some!) in a simple, easy-to-use layout. I love the reminders, tags and the fact it syncs with the Chronicle iOS app via iCloud. Yeah, I got the app for iPhone, too, & love it. I haven’t had any actual problems with Chronicle, but had questions and Support was friendly, helpful & fast! If you’re looking for an in-depth banking or budgeting suite, Chronicle isn’t for you. In a nutshell, Chronicle is quick and simple, enabling you to manage & track bills and give you reminders.

At this point you should save your money and not buy this app. I owned V5 which I paid $10 for and for that price and the functionality V5 had, I think it was worth it. V6 takes a few steps in the wrong direction For starters the screenshot on the app store showing 4.5 mice from macworld is misleading, that review was not for version 6 of the app. The removal of color as an indictor of when bills are due is an unfortunate change - the color coding was a great feature, I cant understand why youd have a feature with value, then remove it. Whereas you used to be able to glace at the color of the icon in your menubar to see if you had any bills upcoming, this feature has sadly been removed in this version. As other reviews have commented the icons used to represent each bill have also gone to monochrome, which really just makes no sense. Some people may long for the days of the black and white Macintosh SE, or the first NeXT cube, but most of us do not, and happily use color as an aid. Ironically, Every single development tool uses color coding to help the developer during development - I wonder if this one found that he did better with all black text? At this point this point the app is just a step above a free todo list manager like wunderlist and I can no longer reccomend it. In addition the price increase to $20 seems just wrong to me - I understand the logic "If it saves you one late payment..." but still, the app doesnt do /that/ much, and now with V6 it does even less. As an alternate, consider starting with the free program wunderlist - you can make a list of your bills, set recurring reminders, and wunderlist syncs with your mobile device, all for free. If the developer lowers the price and brings back color in the menubar icon, then Id rate this as 5 stars, but for now, I just dont understand the direction the app is going in, its certainly not better for the customer, and for that I have to give it one star. I hope I can change that soon! (If you have any doubt about this, please click my user ID and look at my other reviews, most of them are positive!)

I have loved Chronicle for years. I was disappointed back when it joined the club of “anti-skeuomorphism” and lost its wood-desktop-and-writing-pads look. One of its strongest features was, in my opinion, that it made working with bills actually pleasant and peaceful. But its new interface was stark. The green-orange-red “pending” icons, which were soft and had dimension, became flat bright squares. Everything was harder to read on a stark white background. The visual elements that had attractively (and helpfully) separated the information were gone. For me, it made an app I enjoyed using, more difficult. I just let Chronicle update itself, and UGH. This interface is HORRIBLE! All the color icons are gone!! They are all now greyscale, and I don’t care what “shape” they are, they all run together. The distinct icons made it so easy to identify which bills were coming up, and were nice to look at. These are bleak and devoid of any personality the app had. And the “pending” indicators? TINY SLIVERS. (?!?) It was bad enough when they went from dimensional to bright flat squares, but now down to a thin, barely-worth-it skinny rectangle. And there’s basically no space between them now, so the whole thing runs together vertically into a striped line. And they’re not close enough to the bill name/icon to be useful. I’ll be reinstalling an older version, and stick with that. Whatever features have been added, they’re not worth the tradeoff for me. Two versions ago, I would have given this app five stars. Two stars may seem unfairly low, but to me it’s not. Chronicle has lost almost all its personality now, and the new UI actually makes it harder to use. I don’t care how bland and monochrome Apple is making itself, I wish that Chronicle wouldn’t have lost so much of what made it great for me as a user.

I’ve been using this app for nearly four years and it is absolutely perfect! It focuses on one thing: organizing, and reminding me of, all my bills - and it couldn’t be better! I recently had a question about a feature and received a very timely, helpful reply! The recent app update has taken a good app and only made it better! I wish all apps were this good!

I used to love this app but now with the new upgrade, everything is greyed out! It reminds me of the old IBM computer days before color monitors. Please bring back the color! It makes it so much easier to identity each category.

I love the way this app works. It has really simplified and helped me manage all my bills, and the support is great. However, one of the things I liked the most was the icons and color coding. I hate the new look. The grayscale icons are awful and you have a tiny little colorblock all the way over on the right to see the status. I agree with another reviewer who said it looks bland and boring. It absolutely does. Please fix this and bring back the color!

I love having the Desktop & the mobile version. I fill in the info on either app and the other is udated via iCloud. Easy to configure & customizable. Amount Due, Balance, etc. I love the ability to Tag bills. That way I can see certain groups of bills due instead of everything all the time. So now I know how much money is due from what account. I have Monthly, Checking Account, Credit Card, etc. tagged. It keeps records of all your payments and even gives you Statistics for each bill. I contacted support and they emailed back that afternoon. I had 2 more questions after that and they were answered instantly. Love using an app where the Developer is in reach. Although I did prefer the colored icons. Made it easier to tell each bill apart (maybe a future preference :-)). Also, I find myself readjusting the column size everytime I open the app. Maybe that could be tweaked as well. I highly recommend both apps!!

I got this app thinking it would be a good way to track the bills I owe for my small business. I like the concept, but it just does not work for a small business. There are no ways to set up any categories - the icons that go on each bill just seem to be for visual reference and they pretty much uniformly represent houshold time items anyway. There are very few ways to customize any default settings. For instance, the program always assumes that you want to have repeating, online payments. There is no way to change the default setting, so you have to set it up manually each and every time. On your main display, for some reason the program keeps your paid bills listed with the due bills under the setting of “All Active Bills.” You can set it to all bills due this month which will exclude paid bills, but there is no way to view all due bills without also seeing paid bills also. It may be this was completely intended for household use only, but there are still issues even for that use. I think it would be a relatively each fix to be able to change default settings or some of the little annoyances I have found, but for now I’m only giving this 2 stars.

I have tried Quicken. I have tried iBank. And I used Microsoft Money when it was available. But for some reason I was never able to get a handle on my bills and due dates. Then I found Chronicle. This app keeps it simple, which I discovered was the problem with the other financial management apps I had tried. They just wanted to do way more than I wanted them to do. I wanted an app that would tell me what bill was due when and for how much. I wanted to be able to scan/attach a receipt or statement to a payment if I wanted to. And I wanted to see a history of payments. Chronicle does all of this for me. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t log into Chronicle. I just love it. No more late payment fees! In that regard, Chronicle paid for itself several times over just in the first few months. I highly recommend Chronicle. And on top of that, the support is fantastic. I have emailed several times for help on something and I dont think it has ever taken longer than 5 or 10 min to get a response. It’s of course unreasonable to expect that every time, but it goes to show the level of support of the developer. Overall just a great app!

I think that this app is great, but I can only give it 5 stars if they add in these options. New Options 1- colored icons 2- Change currency (just give us the option to set the symbol) 3- Within the app, give us a section on the right, to set links to our bank accounts. So it’s a quick click. 4- Let us choose the work week. In my country it’s Sunday - Thursday 5- I should be able to set how much is my starting balance. Right now I do that by setting new income and then setting that I’ve received a payment today. (I know that this is focused on bills only, but some basic balance features would be extremely useful) 6- When some users first start using the app, they may want to start adding this months previous bills. I’m unable to back date. 7- Income is currently set to look like a bill. It should have it’s own section and be referred to as income not bill 8- Give us the option to select what color to highlight income 9- When I select a bill, I should be able to click on the ‘amount due’ to update the amount due rather than have to click edit. Bugs: 1- When I click on new income, set an income amount as today’s date, then set frequency to Never, it duplicates that ‘bill’ three times