I am all about trying to budget & being aware of your financial situation. But it can be SOOO time consuming reconsiling everything. I heard about an app on a talk show this week, installed it yesterday & think its great so far. It's from http://www.mint.com/ (it was in my app store under mint.com).
The first step is that you add your debit card info (basically your internet banking info). Then the program can tap into your transactions. It starts a budget for you and you can personalize it. I started by adding all the appropriate categories & then categorizing the transactions it missed or was unable to categorize on its own. It's pretty smart on its own though. It knew Safeway was "Groceries" and that Reitmans was "Clothes" and WalMart was simply "Shopping". I used the website via my computer to do all the budget stuff.
Anyhoo, then going forward, each transaction will automatically deduct itself from the appropriate categories. This is where the smart phone app comes in handy, you can see at a glance how your budget is doing that month. Very cool!
Extra cool, the app is FREE!
This app can be as simple (as outlined about) or as detailed as you like (you can add credit cards, investments, goals, etc). You can also see graphs of your spending trends...so much geeky fun :-)
that sounds neat :)
ReplyDelete