Budget Musings

Archive for the ‘Budgeting Tools’ Category

Introducing the new Personal Finance blog aggregator – get all your personal finance news in one place:

http://blogs.calendarbudget.com/

If we’re missing an important blog that you follow, let us know and we’ll have it added.

Enjoy!

Check out the following testimonials from CalendarBudget users:

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Simply Amazing

Wow! I’ve just spent an hour setting up my transactions, history, upcoming transactions, notifications, and accounts and I’ve got to say that this app is obviously build by people who actually use it. Thank you for creating Calendar Budget. I discovered it less than 24 hours ago and have already recommended it to friends and family. This is exactly the budgeting tool I’ve been looking for all my life. In fact, I found it because I was looking at my Google calendar and the cashflow I created in Excel and was thinking there must be some way to merge the two and make it work.

The functionality is excellent…Keep up the amazing effort! Have you considered presenting at DemoCamp Toronto?

-City Dan

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If you haven’t checked out Budget Manager, go take a peek. Simple to use, but very powerful in the way it conveys information about your current financial state.

[My wife] is pretty skeptical about most budget software, because she’s not found something that resembles her budgeting technique, and most programs, like MS Money or Quicken, don’t quite represent the way we spend money and pay bills (though both are nice pieces of software in their own ways).

So I showed her Budget Manager, the demo, and she ‘got it’ right away. She likes to see how much will be in the bank on any one day.

- Chris Wheeler, Ontario, Canada

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I’m so thrilled I found your app. It truly is exactly what I would’ve made for myself. I’d been using an Excel workbook with various spreadsheets on steroids from all kinds of formulas I’d written to keep track of my household budget and financial goals. But it became hard to manage those expenditures that pop up in between set payments and still see the forward impact. I’d thought of creating a calendar myself, but the idea of rewriting formulas was exhausting. So thank you thank you thank you!

One other thing that I’m excited about is that finally my husband and I can be on the same page. If he needs to buy unscheduled gas or grab lunch, he can get a snap shot of our account balance and budget without checking with me first. And he can go in online and make the update himself so I’m not pecking him about a receipt. I hate him feeling like a kid on an allowance!

- Venita Davis

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When I was searching for a product to keep track of my finances I was really happy when I found calendar budget. This product has everything I need and every time I contacted support I received a prompt response. Keep up the good work.

-Squash

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When I hit Google for a calendar budget tool and this site came on as the second link, I almost skipped it because of the fact that it might cost me later (I’m an advocate of 100% free tools and web myself). But then when I failed to find that anywhere (whether online or in software form), I came back to CalendarBudget and had a look-see at the demo… And I realized that this was my dream come true. Before this site I had all my budgeting entries in Google Calendar with the amounts manually entered, and I still had to budget manually with something else to know what was going on in my accounts. I dreamed of having features like CB in Google Calendar, and when I saw the demo page I just knew I’d hit the jackpot.

My second realization was that the money I’m going to save by seeing my budget in advance and knowing when I can spend and when I can’t (had a few bounced checks lately because of miscalculations), I’m going to be saving a lot more money than CB will ever cost. I can also see that Eric is extremely interesting in making CB the most powerful and useful tool for the masses (which I am part of) and that is the cherry on the sundae for me.

There is still work to be done on this tool of life, but like a good wine, it will get better with time!

-Lucas

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About a year ago I started searching for a budgeting/financial program that will help me not only save money but forecast expenses. Every tool I found used the “here’s your account balance, put in expenses and income and here is your account balance now” approach. I wanted something hosted so I could have access to even if I didn’t have my computer with me. After searching for a long time I contemplated creating an application in Excel, then contemplated creating one online that would give me a monthly/yearly view of my accounts. I came up on a forum post where someone suggested CalendarBudget. The first time I logged in I knew this was EXACTLY what I had in mind; my search was over.

CalendarBudget lets you schedule payments and see how it affects your overall accounts over a period of time. It lets you assign budgets to categories and instantly get feedback on how it affects your accounts. I love the fact that you can schedule expenses and instantly know what needs to be changed to as to not go over limits. Constant upgrades, feature additions and user feedback helps in keeping the tool flexible to use in many situations. I used this tool multiple times a day and find it invaluable; looking back I’m not sure how I survived before it.

On top of great features, CalendarBudget is written by an awesome developer in terms of communication and bug fixes. I have had multiple times when I had to contact Eric and received a response almost instantly. Quick responses, great communication and Getting Things Done add a lot of value and credibility. I recommend CalendarBudget to all my friends, relatives and strangers.

-AlexB

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It feels like someone read my mind for what I wanted in a budgeting solution

Calendar Budget is precisely the graphical interface that I envisioned for a budget and money management application. It has a wonderful user interface that took very little time to setup and within a week of using it, I already feel that it is one of the rare gems of web applications that I cannot imagine myself without. Thank you so much for this great service!

-Boyens

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Thanks everyone for these testimonials! We love hearing from you about CalendarBudget and continue to aim to make it the best personal finance tool out there!

We’ve created 2 new tutorial videos:

1. Budgeting With Categories
2. Reconciling Your Bank Account

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.

Folks – 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.”

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CalendarBudget is an online money management tool that helps you organize your money and plan for your future. Plan your finances in a more natural way according to your daily transactions in a calendar view. See your expected account balance displayed in the header for each date.

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.

1. Those that connect directly to your online bank account and pull your financial information for you and attempt to automatically categorize your purchases.
2. Those that require manual input but are much more secure since they don’t touch your actual bank account.

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). See here for a tutorial (http://financialsoft.about.com/od/softwaretitle1/ss/How_to_Export_Download_Financial_Transactions.htm)
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.
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.
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.