I’ve been using the same app on my PPC for about five years as my check register. It’s called MoneyMinder.

MoneyMinder very simple – it doesn’t have fancy icons or nifty reports – it just keeps a checkbook register. The two features that make it so damn usable are “Posted Balance,” and the fact that you can clear a number of items very quickly.

Some financial apps make you click on the item, then select ‘c’ from a drop-down menu. Counting that you have to then close the item, a system as wonky as that requires a minimum of three screen-taps per item to mark it as cleared! Boo-yah.

But MoneyMinder is old. And there are lots of much cuter, newer finacial apps out there. So I tried Pocket Money.

It was atrocious! It assumed you were doing all your financing on your desktop, and just wanted to enter the occasional rare credit card transaction into your PPC.

I considered the time I’d wasted importing my old MoneyMinder files into MS Money and then synching to my PPC as a complete waste. After the suckage of Money, I returned to MoneyMinder.

Then I tried Landware’s Pocket Quicken. My goodness, what a trim little app! I liked the idea of it a great deal, but it wanted too much from me.

All I really want to do is keep a useable copy of my checkbook register on my PPC. I hated that items entered onto the PPC would disappear after a synch. I want to see all my transactions on my PPC, thank you! And I hated the fact that I had to do so much just to select the next check number.

The data entry was just too tedious. So I went back to MoneyMinder.

Then I tried Spb Finance. This is the most attractive, well-rounded, well-thought out financial application I’ve ever seen for PPC. In fact, it’s meant to be a stand-alone app and – hooray! – it doesn’t synch all its secrets to your desktop, leaving you stranded in Albuquerque with no idea whether or not you actually paid your power bill this month. The built-in reports and budget functions are astounding.

But. It takes four screen-taps per item to mark them as cleared! Whoa! And there’s no posted balance! Again!

So I went back to MoneyMinder.

Why do programs purporting to have anything at all to do with checking accounts lack that necessary detail, the posted balance? How can one ever balance without it?

I realize that once upon a time, people balanced their checkbook registers once a month. Now, however, we’ve got this new fangled invention called the Internet, and on it we can find live balances.

With MoneyMinder, I can tell you on any day of the year if my account is in balance: if the balance my bank’s website displays matches the Posted Balance in MoneyMinder, I’m golden!

Honestly, how can people live without this feature? Why don’t any other financial applications for PPC contain this required gem?

Today the posted balance feature of MoneyMinder is more important than ever, because in the process of moving my account from one application to another to another and back, it’s all gotten wonky. I have no idea how much money I really have. It’s a pain, let me tell you.

Perhaps the moral of this story is that it’s sometimes better to just leave well enough alone.