PennyBank was born some day in January, 2009, due to the apparent lack of free financial tools for Mac OS X. After some research in Wikipedia and Google, I found this one: Cashbox. It is free, and open source too, so I started using it.
I liked it, but I soon missed some features: I would like it translated to my language and I would like to have custom statistics, grouping account operations by categories, by date and other criteria. The first improvement didn’t look to hard to get, so I sent an email to the developer. He was very nice and replied quite fast: he asked me to help him translating the program in the next release, and suggested me to file some feature request with my ideas.
And that was the moment when PennyBank was first thought of. I wanted to do something easily portable to other platforms, but with the power of a database. SQLite seemed the answer, so I started looking at Cashbox code, to see if it was using SQLite: if so, it would be so easy to add most of my requests that I could do them myself!
I found it used OS X PList for storing the account operations. That was a fast and easy way (I suppose) to save the information, but it would be slower for dealing with filterings of the data. At that moment I started thinking about my own accounting application.
I found, later, that there was another application called iCompta. It is free (as in free beer, but not as in free speech), and seems powerful enough for my necessities. But now, PennyBank has grown enough to be a personal question for me.