We’ve created 2 new tutorial videos:
I encourage you to take a look at them and see how you can make your budgeting experience more efficient.
To watch the videos, login to your account (or click on the demo account from the home page) and click on the toolbar Help -> Video Tutorials.
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Post CommentFolks – I’ve partially updated CalendarBudget’s Feature development plan. You can see it here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AoOIIEiYI6zsdFRuUmNkYUZMeUJveUJOY0xCYW4wN1E&hl=en
I still need to go through the forums to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I ran out of time today to do that, but this is the document/priority list I’m working from. This is a living document, so thing may be reordered, shifted/changed etc, but should give you an idea of what we’re thinking for upcoming future plans.
Its completely foreign to most companies to expose their plans in this way, but we continue to strive to have our development plans driven by your requests. If you have some ideas of thing you’d like to see added, please post in the forums, where we can have a conversation about your ideas, then they’ll be added to the development plan.
In a budgeting program like CalendarBudget, which tracks every transation, finding a particular one can appear to be daunting if you don’t remember when it occurred.
With CalendarBudget you can search for transactions by either the title of the entry (such as “Restaurant”) or by amount (such as “44.95″). Now maybe you don’t remember the full name of the cents part of the transaction. No problem, you can use the * symbol as a wildcard in the search term.
For example, if I had a transaction called “Dinner at restaurant” for $44.92, the following search terms will find that transaction (and possible others like it):
“44″
“44.9″
“4″
“4*.9″
“dinner”
“Dinner”
“restaurant”
“rest”
“dinner restaurant”
A lot of other combinations will find what you’re looking for, depending on what you remember. This will locate all transactions matching your search term, making finding that particular one you’re wondering about much easier and faster.
When you’ve found that elusive transaction, just click on it in the Search Results. You’ll be taken right to that month with the day bookmarked so its easy to find.
This search capability, introduced many months ago, has helped many users find the transactions they were looking for – quickly and easily. Originally the search only looked for transaction titles. When one of our users suggested we include transaction amounts in the search, we readily agreed, and thanks to that suggestion, we have a great method to locate any transaction you’ve entered into CalendarBudget.
Other suggestions are welcome in our forum.
If you are a mint.com user, this post is for you.
Mint.com pulls your data directly from your bank account and attempts to auto-categorize your transactions. While it is quite convenient, it still lacks the ability to plan ahead. Here’s where CalendarBudget helps. You can now take advantage of the account history you have in mint.com and import that into CalendarBudget.
Here’s how:
First of all, go ahead and create an account at CalendarBudget, then when you first login, choose mint.com as the file import.
To get your transaction file from Mint, login to mint.com and go to the Transactions tab. Then scroll to the very bottom and click the Export all ### transactions link. Save that file to your computer, then go to the CalendarBudget screen and choose it. CalendarBudget will import all of your transactions and categories. At the moment, this will wipe out all of data in CalendarBudget – so you only want to do this if you are starting with CalendarBudget or don’t mind starting over. (If you have existing data and want to start over with mint.com data, you’ll need to reset your current account (Premium users only).
Its that easy; and a great (and fast) way to get started.
We are excited to announce that Business Advisory Centre Durham (BACD.ca) has introduced a new tool, “BACD Money Manager” (powered by CalendarBudget), for their clients to categorize and track daily spending, and plan their future transactions. The “BACD Money Manager” is prominently featured on their “Helpful Links” page as a way to help new start-ups and small businesses with their budgeting needs and manage their financial forecasting. It has been very delightful to work with a very energetic group of people that are keen on helping new start-ups and small businesses succeed.
“Entrepreneurs need to watch every penny as their business grows, often at their own expense; we know what its like.”, says Eric Poulin, CEO and Co-founder of CalendarBudget. “Helping other entrepreneurs become successful by managing their money is right up our alley. Reaching then through the BACD only makes sense.”
Business Advisory Centre Durham (BACD) is a not for profit organization?that provides new start-ups and small businesses with up-to-date and relevant business information needed to help them succeed.
Late last night during an email exchange with one of our saavy users, it was suggested that we provide an iCal feed of CalendarBudget data. iCal is a calendaring format which can be consumed by calendar programs such as those on mobile devices and other calendaring software.
This could be a way for us to easily get onto mobile devices before we planned to. It also addresses some previous requests to combine regular calendaring items and financial information.
Imagine it – you are looking at your calendar events for the day and you also see your balance (as an “All Day” activity) and transactions that occur that day as timed entries (perhaps timed for 11:59pm so they are last on your list. It could be really convenient.
I’d love to hear some feedback on the idea and how it may be used.
On April 28th I attended Finovate Startup 09 as a Startup presenter. We presented on Moday the 27th as a pre-recorded demo, while other presented on the 28th. The demo video is being professionally edited and will be available in about a week. I`ll post it when its available.
The event was a lot of fun, we met a lot of great people, saw what the competition is doing and what our real strengths are. Surprisingly, there are only a few companies who allow for planning future finances. Most only focus on reporting on whats happened in the past. Planning for the future is clearly one of CalendarBudget`s strengths. Also, our calendar format is a clear winner when compared to the other interfaces, most of which just show transactions and planned events in a list. We did glean some ideas for future development, however, we`ll have you the users vote on what we should be doing next.
We have a little bit of clean up surrounding our subcription code to complete this week, then we`ll start posting more `whats next` ideas for you to vote on.
There are 2 camps of personal finance products.
CalendarBudget falls under camp #2. We feel that security these days is one of the most important aspects of online personal finance management. Since this model does not connect directly to your bank, there is some manual input required to get your data into CalendarBudget. Until now, that has meant checking what actually happened with your bank account and manually entering each transaction into CalendarBudget one at a time (reconciling). Admittedly, this was a tedious process. However, the act of seeing each transaction has a benefit – that is, you get to know your money habits much better than if everything is automated.
Recently, CalendarBudget introduced a Bank Reconciliation Assistant, which keeps this important benefit of understanding your spending habits while reducing the tediousness of reconciling between your online bank transaction history and CalendarBudget.
For ongoing reconciling, you can now export your account history to an OFX file (these are sometimes called MS Money or Quicken export files – depends on your bank/credit union) and then import this file into CalendarBudget. CalendarBudget then automatically picks out the transactions that are already in your budget and correct and marks the transactions that need to be added or merged, making the reconciling process MUCH easier and faster.
Here’s how it works.
| 1) Export your data to an OFX file. (This sample screenshot is taken from ScotiaBank’s online banking interface) |  |
| 2) Login to CalendarBudget and select the Bank Import tab in the sidebar (its the new 3rd tab).
Click the browser and select your OFX file from step 1. Then click the Load Transactions button. |
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| 3) You’ll now see the transactions that need to be added/merged in this list.
If the date has a red X beside it, the balance for that day is not correct. This either means that the transactions below that are red need to be created or merged, or that there are entries in your budget plan on the calendar that did not actually happen on that day that should be deleted or moved into the future. |
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| If the red transaction already exists in the calendar but just has the wrong amount, or is on the wrong date, simply drag this red transaction from the list onto the corresponding calendar entry. You’ll then be prompted to confirm the update of that calendar entry to move to the correct date and update the amount. The original transaction name and category will be preserved. |   |
| If the red transaction needs to be created (it doesn’t already exist in the calendar), simply drag it to any blank spot or day header on the calendar and you’ll be prompted to create that entry and optionally give it a more descriptive name and category. |  |
After a few minutes of reconciling using this new Bank Reconciliation Assistant, even a budget that has been neglected for a few weeks is easily updated with no frustrating addition, subtraction and flipping between screens trying to compare balances on your budget and online banking transaction history.
This feature has been a long time coming for CalendarBudget. Already I’ve been using this and its a HUGE relief compared to the old way. I hope you find the same.
We’re happy to announce that the Business Advisory Center Durham (BACD) has partnered with CalendarBudget to provide our personal finance tool to new and growing entrepreneurs in the Durham region. CalendarBudget can help not only manage peoples personal finances, but can also be used as a forecasting tool to plan for small business expenses and incomes.
Embedded in the BACD web site as the BACD Money Manager, CalendarBudget will enhance the breadth of offerings the BACD makes available to help entrepreneurs succeed.? From the BACD website, click Helpful Links from the top menu and then click the BACD MOney Manager image to access it.
CalendarBudget is an online personal finance management tool that helps you organize your money and plan for your future.
We are excited to announce that W.B. White Insurance and Financial has now made CalendarBudget available as its Money Manager tool of choice for their clients. CalendarBudget is available through the “Budget Manager” link on their toolbar just below their logo.
CalendarBudget provides the hands on tool to aid the clients of W.B.White in implementing the great money management ideas they are learning from W.B. White. CalendarBudget’s easy to use interface was created with simplicity in mind so people, like W.B. White clients, can maintain their budget in a few minutes a day and plan their future with the expected account balance shown next to the date for each day.
W.B. White is an insurance brokerage firm serving the Durham Region in Ontario, Canada since 1929. They “are not tied to any one insurance company” and they “have access to an extensive range of policies offered by many of the major property and casualty insurance companies.”
Where do you see yourself financially in 2 years or 5 years? Create an account with CalendarBudget now and have a look at your financial future!
