ClearCheckbook News & Updates

Today we're announcing a new Sync Membership that allows you to connect up to 5 financial institutions to ClearCheckbook.

This membership is for people who want to connect their bank to ClearCheckbook but don't want or need all of the additional features that come with ClearCheckbook Premium. The Sync Membership costs $2.49 per month and gives you the ability to connect up to 5 financial institutions.

You can upgrade to the Sync Membership by clicking on Settings at the top right side of the page and then click on the Manage Your Sync Membership link under the Syncing Transactions section. More information about the upgrade process can be found here: Our Manage Your Sync Membership Knowledge Base article.

Here are some FAQs about the Sync Membership and Bank Connecting

What counts as a connection? A connection is counted for different financial institutions. For example, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Capital One are three different connections. We do not count multiple connections to the same institution toward your total. If you have 3 different accounts with Wells Fargo, that still only counts as one connection.

Is my bank supported? You can check to see if your financial institution is supported here: Our Supported Banks Knowledge Base article.

Can I have more than 10 connections? If you have a ClearCheckbook Premium membership and also purchase a Sync Membership, you will be able to connect up to 10 financial institutions.

I want to learn more about how to connect my bank to ClearCheckbook We have a full support page that covers how to connect your bank to ClearCheckbook here: Our Connecting to your Bank Knowledge Base article.

Why do we charge for these connections? The service that provides your transactions charges ClearCheckbook a flat fee per institution connection per month. Unlike other financial services that offer these connections for free, we do not sell your data, show ads or receive income from any source other than our ClearCheckbook Premium upgrades. We are offering this Sync Membership and our Premium Membership in order to cover the connection fees.

We just released our first big update of 2021 which includes over 20 new features, tweaks and bug fixes. The biggest new feature is the ability to connect to your bank and have your transactions automatically synced to ClearCheckbook!

Connecting with Financial Institutions
You read that correctly! We're extremely happy to announce that ClearCheckbook can now connect with over 10,000 different financial institutions so you can have your transactions automatically downloaded each day. This feature is available to all ClearCheckbook Premium members and allows you to connect accounts at up to 5 different financial institutions.

You can see if your bank is supported by using the Search Institutions form on our Syncing with Financial Institutions knowledge base page. More information about how to set up ClearCheckbook to sync with your bank can be found on our Connecting to your Bank knowledge base article.

Updates / Site Tweaks:

• Updated the Account Settings list to make account information easier to see at a glance
• When adding transactions, we added an alert if it seems like you might be entering an incorrect date (for example, maybe you forgot to change the year)
• We added a Knowledge Base article for Site Navigation
• Updated precision of currency conversions to 9 digits
• If you set up custom transaction form ordering, the input focus will be on the first field that takes keyboard input (rather than always defaulting to the Amount field)
• We added links in the Register Options to view only Current and Future transactions
• You can now delete payments in the Money Lending Tracker in case you mistakenly added one
• Updated how file attachment URLs are generated to improve privacy and security

Bug fixes:

• The name of a bill might be displayed incorrectly under some circumstances
• Currency conversions weren't being set up correctly when creating a new account with a currency different than the global default
• Investment Portfolio gadget was showing an incorrect Last Price under some circumstances
• Inactive categories were showing up as n/a in the Budgets list. Now they are hidden from the list.
• Made sure currency conversions couldn't be set to 0
• Fixed how split children amounts were displayed in CSV export to allow for better import
• Archived account names weren't showing up in exported files
• Sum of splits wasn't being calculated correctly when editing a recurring transaction
• Orphaned categories were causing problems in Profit and Loss report
• Fixed a bug that would cause an error in the Duplicate Transaction check if an account didn't exist

We already have several other updates that are currently in our queue or are already under development. If you have any other suggestions for new features or any other improvements we could make to ClearCheckbook, please let us know!

2020 was a huge year of updates for ClearCheckbook with the launch of Version 5 of the website and Version 4 of both the iOS and Android apps.

The launch of ClearCheckbook V5

ClearCheckbook version 5 had been in the works for a while and we finally made V5 live in August. Version 5 included over 100 new features, options and settings. You can look back at our blog post announcing V5 as well as the release notes for a full list of all the work that went into the update and what new features were included.

Major updates to improve the speed and performance of the website

After launching V5, we focused a lot of extra attention on tweaking our server and database setups to make the site much more efficient. If you're curious about some of the updates we made, you can check out our blog post on the subject.

New iOS and Android apps

We launched new versions of the iOS and Android apps in late June. These new versions were a complete rewrite that makes it easier for us to streamline updates to the apps. There were some hiccups at the launch of the new apps, but we worked around the clock to get those fixed. The apps are stable now and any bugs that have popped up have been resolved quickly.

To followup the V4 release of the apps, we recently updated the apps to 4.1 which included a lot of new features and settings that had been suggested to us. The 4.1 update really focused on making the app much more streamlined with the website by taking a lot of the settings (such as date format and custom transaction fields) and putting them in their own Settings menu. If you update the settings via the app, they will also update the website and vice versa.

Connecting to banks is finally coming!

We're super excited to announce that the most requested feature we've received since launching ClearCheckbook in 2006 is finally being introduced. Soon you'll be able to connect ClearCheckbook with your financial institutions so your transactions are automatically synced from your bank and into ClearCheckbook throughout the day. We're putting the finishing touches on the code and then need to do some extensive testing, but so far everything looks like it's working very well!

ClearCheckbook has prided itself on putting privacy and security first and this isn't going to change. The bank connection feature is 100% optional but will help open ClearCheckbook to people who don't want to manually enter or import all of their transactions. Making ClearCheckbook more accessible and giving more people the ability to manage their finances has always been one of our main goals. Offering this feature falls right in line with that.

Happy New Year

While 2020 has definitely been a year none of us expected or planned for, we're very hopeful for a bright and exciting 2021. This is also going to be a big year for ClearCheckbook as the site will turn 15 years old in May.

Thanks to everyone who has been using ClearCheckbook to manage your finances. Whether you've been using the site for free or you're a paying member, we really appreciate you choosing ClearCheckbook and we hope to continue making the site and apps better so managing your finances becomes easier and easier.

-Brandon

ClearCheckbook version 5 was launched on August 15th and since then we've been making a lot of updates to improve the speed of the site.

If you feel like ClearCheckbook has been loading and responding a little quicker than normal, you're not imagining things! We've been hard at work upgrading many aspects of both the hardware and software running ClearCheckbook to help improve response and load times.

Some of the updates we've made:

• Doubled the RAM in our database - This improves data caching which dramatically decreases the time it takes to look up items in the database
• Separated sessions, job queue and cache into separate databases - This helps the site make different types of requests for information without causing a data backlog
• Updated the server configuration to better handle higher traffic periods - Adding more CPUs during high traffic period helps throughput and response time
• Updated asset compression and cache expiration - This speeds things up by telling the browser to store certain files for a longer period of time
• Changed the home page slightly and changed image formats - Changing the layout of the home page helped us remove some of the files that were loading and using up unnecessary bandwidth
• Added a slight delay in the auto-complete fields - Rather than querying the database every time a keystroke is made, it will now ping the database a few tenths of a second after the last ping.

We hope these improvements have been noticeable and have helped make the site feel a little snappier. We'll continue to monitor various aspects of the site and work on making speed and response improvements as needed.

After nearly two years of development and testing, we're extremely happy to announce the update to ClearCheckbook Version 5 is complete! Check out many of the new features and updates here: v5 Release Notes

Version 5 has over 100 updates, new features and bug fixes all on top of a new development framework. In addition to the new framework, all of the 3rd party libraries we use have been updated which will help make updates and new feature additions much easier moving forward.

The site doesn't look any different, what changed?
One of our biggest goals with the Version 5 upgrade was to make sure the site looked and behaved like everyone has grown used to. Almost the entirety of the updates apply to the part of the site you don't see. We call this the backend and it's the code that actually runs all of the logic behind ClearCheckbook.

Why was this update necessary?
The last version of ClearCheckbook was running on a development framework that was initially implemented in 2008 and then heavily updated in 2014. While we were keeping up with the latest in security measures, we started to realize that the framework was getting outdated and we weren't able to keep some features working correctly (ie: Automatic Backups to Microsoft OneDrive being disabled).

Many of the 3rd party APIs we deal with were updating and would stop working with the old version of ClearCheckbook. In an effort to stay on top of this, we started development of Version 5 back in late 2018. Version 5 runs on an entirely new development framework which has a much more active development community. This means it's extremely easy to keep the underlying code that runs ClearCheckbook updated with the latest security patches and version updates.

Taking security and privacy to the next level
ClearCheckbook was built with privacy and security in mind and the idea that your financial data is yours. Staying true to these goals, we've updated how our "Lost Password" function works and added a Trusted Devices feature that works in conjunction with Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). Speaking of 2FA, we also implemented a way to access your account if you get locked out due to losing access to your authenticator app.

The new ClearCheckbook Knowledge Base
The previous Help / FAQ section was very limited in its scope and only addressed the most basic of questions about the various tools and features ClearCheckbook has to offer. We knew that Version 5 was the perfect opportunity to build up an extremely extensive Knowledge Base that covers how to use every feature on the site. The amount of detail and information contained within the Knowledge Base is enormous. Each Knowledge Base article is filled with screenshots and full explanations on any features/settings specific to that page.

The Knowledge Base is broken down into sections (General, Tools, Reports, Settings and Apps). Each parent section has sub sections related to each tool or setting. You can find the updated Knowledge Base by clicking on the Help / FAQ link in the Support section at the bottom of the page. A direct link is here: ClearCheckbook Knowledge Base.

A special thanks to all the Version 5 beta testers
The amount of feedback we received during the testing phase of Version 5 was overwhelmingly helpful. Thank you to everyone who has been using Version 5 for the last seven months. You've helped us find and fix many issues we never would have caught in our own testing. Beta testers - you know who you are and thank you!

What if I notice an issue or find an error?
Version 5 went through seven months of beta testing with hundreds of active users so we feel pretty confident that most issues were found and fixed. If you do happen to notice something not working correctly, please message us through the Contact Us link at the bottom right side of the page.

Looking toward the future

As mentioned earlier, Version 5 sets some extremely solid foundation for future updates and new features. We have a huge list of updates that we plan on making now that Version 5 is released. We'll post more information about the next round of new features and updates when they're being launched.

When I built what would eventually become ClearCheckbook in my college apartment back in 2005, I never could have imagined what the site and apps have turned into. If someone had told me the site would help nearly half a million users manage a fifth of a billion transactions, I don't think I would have believed them.

Thanks everyone for the continued support!

-Brandon