Personal Finance Software Reviews

**Update: Weekly Envelope has (not surprisingly) closed it’s doors. Unless, of course, you understand Russian. If so, you can find use Weekly Envelope here, otherwise they’ve shut down their English version of the site.

Weekly Envelope is a budget planner that uses the envelope budgeting methodology to a certain degree and adds a little bit of a twist in there.  Weekly Envelope is a free service that’s designed to help you make sure that you don’t spend more than you bring in.

I’m a huge fan of the envelope budgeting system, so I’m fairly excited to take a look at Weekly Envelope.  Let’s dive in.

Getting Started with Weekly Envelope

After clicking you simply input your information to sign up for an account.  As you can see in the image below, they don’t ask for much, allowing you to take a very anonymous approach if you wish to do so.  Those that don’t feel comfortable having a third party know their personal and banking information will feel comforted by the fact Weekly Envelope doesn’t ask for anything of the sort.

I wasn’t sure what the “Family Members” section was for.  I assumed it has something to do with setting up the envelopes later.  It turns out that you must enter the members of your family in this area in order to set up your profile (and input income) a few steps later.  A little clarification or tooltip might have been nice.

Profile Setup

Overview

The first of six steps in the profile setup wizard gives a quick overview of how you’ll set up the system.  It mentions that working with Weekly Envelope involves two steps: creating a financial plan and executing that plan.  Simple enough.  Our financial plan, according to Weekly Envelope, consists of Income, Expenses, and Financial Goals.  Also simple.  So far so good.

Income

In the second step, you input your family’s income.  From what I can tell they’ve covered all the major sources and intervals of income that you could have.  However, those that work on commission or have an varying source of income may find it a little difficult to use the system.

Expenses

The third step consists of entering all of your known expenses.  You can do this easily by clicking the (add expense) button and entering the expense information.  While this certainly isn’t difficult, it does get time consuming since you have to submit and wait for a new page to come up after every single expense.  I quickly got tired of inputing the information (although budgeting is suppose to be work right?).

Balance

Step four asks you to verify your “Balance”  I’m assuming this is meant to be the current balance of your bank account.  Again, a little clarification would have been nice.  I input what our current bank balance is.

Goals

The fifth step is the Goal section. Here you can add and modify your financial goals (buy a new car, build up an emergency fund, etc.).  By default they have Emergency Fund as a goal.  A great goal that everyone should have.  You can edit the goal by clicking “Modify Goal.”

This is a nice little function.  It allows you to put the amount of the goal, how much you have saved so far, and when you want to achieve that goal.  You can then input how much you want to save each month/week/whatever to accomplish the goal.  They also have an ‘Auto’ option that will fill in this number, but I couldn’t get it to work.

Back on the goal page, it gives me this nice little goal graph:

Apparently I need to save $140 each week in order to meet my goal to have a $5,000 emergency fund saved up  by the end of this year.

They offered a number of suggested goals (home appliance, home repair, and vacation among others).

Finished

The sixth step is simply a pat-on-the-back step.  You’re presented with this congratulations screen:

It says that I’ve input all the info I need to for now, and that the system will calculate an affordable amount of weekly expenses.  This has a bit of a hands-off feel to it that I’m not sure what I think about yet.  I don’t know if I like the idea of having some number that’s given to me through some unknown calculation be my sole guide for spending.  *I’m sure you could easily figure out the where the number comes from (which they even explain on their blog), but my guess is the majority of people will just take the number and run with it.

I’m personally more of a fan of being very cognizant of exactly how your budget works and how it is that your income and expenses relate to each other.

“Execution” in Weekly Envelope

After clicking on “Fill Expenses” on the final step of setup, this is was you’re presented with:

My first thought? Cluttered and unclear.

After looking over it a little bit, however, it became more clear that this was basically my financial “plan” for this week (Aug. 10th – Aug. 16th).

Since they didn’t do the greatest job of demonstrating or teaching what all this information is, I’ll go through each section and try to (briefly) explain it.

This is fairly straight forward.

I think the best thing for you to do in order to see what these links do is to click around and see for yourself.

Now this is the part that seemed especially cluttered to me:

After looking over it a for a bit, you’ll find that on the left is the listing of days of this week.  Today (you’ll see that it’s highlighted) is Tuesday.  Under each day there is a list of a few items. One is the amount of “disposable” income that I am allowed to spend that day.  This is shown as “From envelope.“  On that same line are the family members (Chance and Spouse) and the amount they’ve spent that day.  You can enter what you spend that day by clicking on the edit icon ().  You’ll see the following screen:

You can enter your transaction as it shows (the freedom of format here leads me to think that you could easily end up with difficult to read/remember expense information).

The amount spent is taken out of the daily allotted amount.

You’ll also see other line items that are basically the planned or scheduled expenses.  In the screenshot above, for example, I am supposed to transfer $600 to my Emergency Fund today in order to meet the goal that I set.  I’m also suppose to spend $30 on Fuel today and $250 on my student loan on Friday.

You can click the edit icon on either of these line items to put in the amount that you actually spent.  As an example, if I spent $25 on Fuel, it would reflect the spending in the following manner:

Where it gets a little more tough, however, is when you start deviating from your scheduled spending (which you most certainly will).

Admittedly, I’ve probably not given this screen the detailed walkthrough that it really needs in order for you to be effective with it.  I believe, however, that the best way for you to get a feel for how this system works is to click around and play with it yourself.

“Plan” in Weekly Envelope

If you click on the Plan tab, you’re presented with the following screen:

The top section consists of your family’s income, with the option to edit.

The middle section shows the family expenses, the financial goals, and the amount in the envelopes (what you have left over).

The bottom section gives an overview of your weekly budget and how much you have left over in your envelopes.

Again I get the feeling that I’m presented with a bunch of information, but with little guidance as to what it all means.  This is particularly true of the middle section.

“Goals” in Weekly Envelope

The Goals tab is one of the only sections of the software that I actually liked.

It was clear and concise.  It shows you exactly what your goal is, how far along the way you are to acheiving it, and exactly what you need to do next week to accomplish that goal.

“Reports” in Weekly Envelope

There are three reports offered in Weekly Envelope.  I had somewhat expected them to be much like other reports in other personal finance software applications (spending graphs, envelope balance reports, etc.).  They were a bit different than expected:

The Planning Accuracy report is kind of fun to look at, but I don’t see how this helps you much in managing your finances (except to maybe help you set realistic amounts when budgeting).

Also, let me translate the last report:  “Expense accumulations and goal savings” = The balance of your spending categories (what you have left to spend in different categories).

Conclusion

The envelope budgeting method is a very good, very simple financial management methodology to follow.  You get income, you set aside money into different categories (envelopes) and then spend from those allotted amounts.

It seems as though Weekly Envelope is trying to appeal to the person that simply wants a program to tell them what they can spend each day and week (which practice is fundamentally flawed in my opinion).  While Weekly Envelope uses the simple budgeting methodology, they seem to have complicated it quite a bit (possibly by trying to make it even more simple than it is).  I have two main complaints about Weekly Envelope:

The first turnoff for me was the interface.  It seemed cluttered, unclear, and a bit unprofessional.   If you spend some time with the program, I’m sure that you’ll get the hang of it and know how to easily manage the system.  But it was clear that some big improvements could be made in the way information was presented.

Also, after you input your information, it calculates all the figures in the background and seemingly spits out some magical numbers that you are to follow.  They are simple calculations, but they’ve ‘mystified’ something that was quite straight forward to begin with.  Even while I’m inputting the transaction information into the system, I don’t get a clear sense of exactly how those transactions effect and relate to the rest of the system.  It feels more as though my budget is running me, rather than me running my budget.

Apparently I missed something with Weekly Envelope.  I’ll be the first to admit, that I didn’t quite catch the vision.  Had I had some Ah-ha moment, my experience may have been different.

It’s free, so if you have some extra time on your hands, give it a try.  Otherwise, I’d suggest going with a more proven system.

CommonCents 2.0 is a personal finance software application that uses the time-tested envelope budgeting method (of which I’m a huge fan) to help you better manage your finances.

This new release (2.0) reportedly has many new features and improvements over the previous edition.  It is said to give you “More Security and Reliability, More Control, and More Speed.”

*Note: This is a review of CommonCents 2.0.  There has since been a new version (3.0) released which states the following NEW features:

• Reminders and Notifications
• Goal Setting and Tracking
• Improved Financial Reports and Graphs
• Streamlined Importing Functionality
• Multiple Document Attachment
• Archiving Capabilities
• Export Manager

Version 2.0 Features

As a quick summary, here are some of the features that CommonCents 2.0 states on their website:

• Enhanced Data Encryption
• Local or Remote Storage (convenience for some, more security for others)
• Backup and Recovery Manager
• Log Manager (to help with customer support)
• Options Manager (with some added functionality such as auto-assigning envelopes for payees)
• Enhanced Budget Manager (can now allocate income by % or $)
• Enhanced Scheduling Options
• Improved Importing Functionality
• Payee Manager
• Hot Keys (to help with data entry)
• Improved Transfer Options

CommonCents 2.0 (enDevelopment’s flagship product) has stuck with the same envelope-style budget and still uses the checkbook-style register.

It appears that CommonCents 2.0 was a big improvement upon the previous version with quite a few features added.

How Does CommonCents 2.0 stand up against the competition?  Let’s dig in and find out.

My Experience with CommonCents 2.0

I took my first impression of CommonCents from the website advertising the product.  It was very clean, shiny, and web 2.0-ish.

Interested in a quick overview of the personal finance software, I chose to check out the Demo.  It was insightful and gave me a quick feel for the application. I was somewhat surprised to see that the actual application didn’t have the same look and feel as the website (not as shiny or polished).

Downloading CommonCents

For those Mac lovers out there, I’m sorry to say that CommonCents is currently only offered for the Windows platform.  You can, however, use an emulator (like I did) to run it just fine.

The download process went pretty smoothly.  It took a total of maybe 2 minutes to go through the process.  The screenshots detail most of the steps taken.

Upon launch of the program I was reminded that I have 60 days to use the software before I have to buy a license.

Setting Up CommonCents 2.0

Once you register and get your first glance at the application you’re greeted with a welcome screen with some suggestions to help you get started.

They suggest 3 things: 1. view some online tutorials, 2. read the “Introduction” in the help files, and 3. use the “Preparation Checklist” to get organized.  I like that CommonCents kind of walks you through the process and doesn’t leave you staring at an empty piece of software wondering what to do.

Having said that, it also causes me to wonder if the system isn’t quite as simple as they originally made it out to be (I need a preparation checklist to use the software?). I did as they suggested and checked out the resources.  Although I don’t know if they are absolutely necessary, many will find them helpful when getting started.

CommonCents Main Screen

As you can see (click image to enlarge), CommonCents consists of one main screen that is basically your financial control center.

Along the top are buttons for the different “managers” that you’ll use throughout your budgeting.  These include: Vault, Account, Envelope, Income, Budget, Report, Reconcile, and Backup managers.

The main section of this screen is a register for your transactions that looks much like a digitized checkbook register (in fact, it reminded me a bit too much of my checkbook balancing days and brought back some bad memories).

To the right we have a listing of the different envelopes we are tracking in our budget (you can edit which envelopes appear here – more on that later) along with their current balances.

At the bottom is a listing of our different bank accounts and their balances.

First Impression

My first thought after getting into the software dealt with the disconnect between the appearance of the software and the look and feel of the website.

Maybe I incorrectly expected the two designs to be similar, but I found the software application to a bit too grey and unfriendly.

This is just a personal observance (and preference for more friendly applications) and shouldn’t have much effect on your budgeting effectiveness.

Customizing Your Budget Envelopes

This isn’t exactly the order that CommonCents tells you to go to get started with the software,but this is how I see it making the most sense.  Start first by customizing your categories (envelopes) the way you’ll use it.

The reason I say this is because once you start adding accounts with opening balances, you’ll want to split the amount into your envelopes to start budgeting.

To edit the envelopes click on the Envelope Manager button.  I personally found the need to do quite a of customizing with the envelopes to cater to the way I like to budget.

I thought that there were a number of envelopes that clearly should have been child categories to certain parents (for example, Rent and Home Repair could be child categories to Household).  At the very least, I didn’t think that some categories were grouped together as nice as they could have been.

I ran into an error when I tried adding a ‘Personal/Entertainment’ envelope because there was already an ‘Entertainment’ envelope.  The error is fine, but it’s the way the error was displayed that I thought was interesting.  It said:

“The changes you requested to the table were not successful because they would create duplicate values in the index, primary key, or relationship.  Change the data in the field or fields that contain duplicate data, remove the index, or redefine the index to permit duplicate entries and try again.”

I only bring this up to show that there could maybe be a little more thought put into the user experience here.  For those not familiar with computers or databases, that sentence makes very little sense and leaves them a little wide-eyed.  Remove the index? Primary key? Field?  Sure, I know what those are, by my mother sure doesn’t.

A simple “That category already exists, please either name it differently or delete the other category.” would have worked just fine.

The only other gripe I have about the envelopes section of CommonCents is the way that they are ordered by default.  It’s alphabetical (which is fine), but there is no clear hierarchy to the envelopes or any convention to help you see the different envelope groups (parent categories) more clearly.

This may be due to the fact that I’m used to YNAB’s budget which clearly shows the relationship of each envelope to the next.  Even a simple ‘Tab in’ for each child category would help it out a lot visually.

I will say, however, that I like that CommonCents allows you to add and remove custom categories as you wish.  I feel this is an essential function to any effective budget.

Setting Up Accounts

If you wish to add any accounts, you can do so by clicking the Account Manager at the top.

I decided to stick with the default Cash, Checking, Credit Card, and Savings accounts they give by default.  After clicking on the account at the bottom, enter a starting balance in the register.

Being that it uses envelope budgeting, you will need to set up an initial budget (allocate to your budget envelopes) with this opening balance.  You can start dividing up your opening balance by clicking the button.  This is where the ‘preparation checklist’ will come in handy if you chose to fill it out.

You can see in the screenshots below that I allocated the “income” into different envelopes (rent, savings, etc.).

I found as I was going back and forth between adding new envelopes and splitting the money in different categories, that there was a good 2-3 second delay after I hit the Split button.  (I often clicked a second time, thinking that I hadn’t clicked it the first time… but I had.) *Note: A user recently informed me that this delay is no longer occurring. Thank you CommonCents!

I found that this delay continued for each time I edited a transaction and quickly became quite annoying.

Adding & Editing Transactions

Adding Transactions Manually

While adding transactions manually wasn’t necessarily difficult, it just wasn’t as quick as I would have hoped.  I like that they allow you to tab to each new area of the transaction.  This helps immensely.

For a while I was frustrated by the fact that I had to get the mouse and click for each new transaction that I entered.  I then remembered the mentioning of ‘Hot Keys’ and looked it up in the Help menu.  By typing ALT-N, a new transaction will be initiated.  Remember this if you’re entering a large number of transactions! You’ll be glad you did.

I also liked that you can change the width of the columns in the register to best suite your needs.  Except, I couldn’t change the width of the category column.  Being that some of the categories are relatively long, you can’t see the whole category without clicking the drop down arrow.  This plays a big part since you must start typing the category using the parent category and can’t type in the name of the child category.

For example, as you can see in the image below, after typing “Personal” and arrowing down, I wasn’t able to tell which cateogory I was selecting.  I was looking for: Personal/Fun Money:Hers

Is this a deal breaker? Probably not, but it’s the culmination of little things like this that can make an application more difficult to use.

Importing Transactions

You can import transactions into CommonCents 2.0 by clicking on ‘Managers’ at the top, then selecting ‘Import Manager.”  The import manager opens up and you can select which account you want to import into and then upload the file.

Also, enDevelopment Team: May I suggest having an icon for the Import Manager at the top since that will likely be a very frequently visited manager?

I ran into a little trouble here.  The CommonCents documentation states that it can import the widely accepted .QFX format.  But when I tried to upload the .QFX file, it gave me this error:

Now I don’t know if this was just a fluke, one-time thing or if it really only accepts .OFX files for the current time.  I tried multiple times and couldn’t get it to work.  Unfortunately, my bank doesn’t offer an .OFX file download.  I’ll be sure, however, to check back in the future to see if it has been fixed.

If the importer works as advertised, however, it sounds like it may be pretty nice.  I like that you have the option of editing the transactions before they go into the register.

The Income & Budget Manager

Much of your budgeting will be done in the Income Manager and the Budget Manager.  You can set up different sources of income in the Income Manager so that when you get paid, all you have to do is go into the income manager, select the income (change the amount if necessary) and have it enter the income transaction.

The reason why it’s important to set up income sources like this is because you can tie them to the budget allocations that you choose.  By going into the Budget Manager you can set up different allocations of your income for each source of income.  See the screenshots:

You’ll notice that the Budget Manager didn’t allow me to complete the process until every dollar was allocated to the envelopes.  This is called Zero Based Budgeting, and I love it – it’s extremely effective.

The main thing that I don’t like about the budgeting functionality is that there are too many steps to move money between envelopes.  What this means is that in order to alter your budget throughout the month you have to go into the budget manager (or the individual income transaction) and edit the allocated amounts.

For example, say part way through the month I decide to take a little from my Restaurant envelope and put it into the Grocery envelope (because we want to eat healthier).  If I go the Budget Manager route, it takes me 8 clicks, two data entries, and two new windows to change the amount.  That’s a lot of clicking.  (*Note: a user recently informed me that it only takes 5 clicks now.)  Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just edit the envelopes straight from the envelope window at the right (and take only 2 clicks)?

*Update: You can use the Transfer Manager to move money between envelopes (which was easier and more intuitive), but this still required 9 clicks.

I’m personally one who monitors and (and sometimes alters) my budget on a weekly basis.  Having so many extra steps to change the amounts a little would get old real quick.

CommonCents’ Reports

CommonCents offers a number of different reports.  Although they may not be the reports you were expecting to see.  Most personal finance software has reports in the forms of bar graphs, pie charts, etc.  The CommonCents reports, however, are all simple data listings.  This, for example, is the Envelope Register Report (click to enlarge, if you wish):

This may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your preferences.  I like some of the reports they offer, but also recognize the benefit of some good graphical reporting when trying to visualize our spending and areas in which we can improve.

For your reference, here is their list of reports:

Other Managers

There are a number of different ‘Managers’ that you can use to manage the system.  In order to not bore you with the details of each, here’s a quick summary and screenshot of each:

Reconcile Manager: A tool to help you reconcile your bank statements with your CommonCents software.

Merge Manager: A nice feature that allows you to permanently merge (and alter all previous transactions) two envelopes.  You probably wont use this much, but when you need to, you’ll be glad they have it.

Transfer Manager: Allows you transfer money between accounts or between envelopes.  While this is nice, it would be nice to have that kind of functionality using a transaction in the register or using the envelope window at the right.

Memorized Transaction Manager: Allows you to schedule transactions.

Payee Manager: You can edit the payees that CommonCents has remembered for you.

Log Manager: Keeps a log of your activities to be used if you need support.  The fact that they have this feature makes me wonder if they’re anticipating having problems?

Backup Manager: Nice feature and pretty self explanatory.

CommonCents 2.0 Price

Once your 60 day trial (a very generous trial length, by the way) is over you can purchase a license for continued use for $34.95.  This isn’t a bad price for an envelope budgeting package.

Although, in my personal opinion, I would rather flip the slightly larger bill for some of the better envelope solutions out there.

Conclusion

CommonCents is a less expensive alternative to some of the other envelope budgeting systems.  The envelope budgeting method is a time-tested method to manage your money and works extremely well.  It causes you to be responsible for each dollar you bring in and each dollar that goes out.  I like that CommonCents reinforces the envelope principles and a zero based budget.

I found, however, that CommonCents wasn’t quite as polished, simple, or quick as other similar systems.  There were numerous little areas that needed improvement, and when they’re all taken into account, the program as a whole is little too tedious for my tastes.  Issues such the .QFX importing issue, the transaction editing,  and the budgeting functionality (among others) were all somewhat of a turnoff.

For those, however, that have learned their way around the CommonCents software and like the way it functions, its envelope budgeting will be highly effective.  They have a great 60 day trial, so you may as well give it a try to see if you like it.

Buxfer is another web 2.o finance application to join the likes of Mint, Wesabe, Quicken Online, and more.  Truth be told, however, Buxfer has actually been around for quite a while.  It seems to just now be getting more attention and probably for good reason.

While not a ’shiny’ as Mint, with some good functionality and even some new features, Buxfer has some real potential.  Does it have what it takes to give Mint the boot?  Read on to find out.

*Note: Since this review was written the founders of Buxfer has stopped supporting it and have both started working at Facebook. It looks like the service is still available to use, but some are saying that the site isn’t as stable as it once was. I imagine it will only be a matter of time till it’s shut down completely.

A Brief Buxfer History

One thing that I like about Buxfer is that it was created by (and appears to still be run by) a pretty small team.  One of the co-founders, Ashwin Bharambe created Buxfer (apparently a mix between the words ‘bucks’ and ‘transfer’) to better track the large amount of “IOU’s” floating around while he was in college at Carnegie Mellon.

Shortly thereafter he teamed up with Shashank Pandit and they launched the Buxfer website in December, 2006.  Since then they’ve received some funding from Y Combinator as well as a few angel investors.

Getting Started with Buxfer

After clicking the “Sign Up for Free” button on the main Buxfer site, you simply enter your email address and desired password.  You will need to verify your email within 24 hours, but they allow you to continue without verifying right then (thankfully since a day later I still have received the verification email from them).

You’re then presented a screen to choose a membership plan.  There three options:

Basic: Free

Plus: $1.79 / month

Pro: $2.79 / month

As you can see in the chart (click to enlarge), you get quite a bit of functionality with the free version.  The upgraded versions basically allow you more accounts, budgets, financial projections, etc.  You also get ‘Priority customer support.”  Only time will tell if this ‘Priority’ support will be needed.

*Update:  See ‘The Need to Upgrade’ near the end of this review.

I chose the basic membership.

Setup Your Accounts

After logging in you’re asked if you want to have your transactions automatically sychronized or manually enter them.  You’ll see in the screenshot that to the side of ‘Manual Entry’ they show that you have the option of  the IOU tracking.  I’m not sure yet if that means that you must choose to manually enter your transactions in order to have that functionality or not.  I surely hope not.

I personally believe that manually entering in your transactions helps with money management, but being that I thought most people would choose to have their transactions synchronized automatically, I too chose that option.

You simply find your bank, enter your online login info, and you’re off.  After picking which account you want used, it downloads the transactions.

Set Budgets

Buxfer then takes you back to the account setup screen and has you enter in some budget limits on your spending.  As you can see in the screenshot, Buxfer aparently categorized some of my transactions wrong because I certainly spent more than $43.24 on food last month. This is, however, to be expected until you go in and re-categorize the transactions.  The way some of those transactions appear, you can’t expect these software programs to be perfect.

Schedule Bills

I put in a scheduled bill for rent for next month.  I’m not sure if it makes this a recurring bill or not.  Apparently by entering a bill, I will get an email reminder about it.

When I hit submit, I got this error message.  Fyi, you can only put dates in the following format: 25 Jun 2009.  Not very user friendly in my opinion.  Also when I hit close, it exited out of the account setup rather than putting me back where I could fix the date.

A small bug for sure, but something that hopefully will be fixed in the future.    (For those that made the same mistake, you can get back into the account setup by clicking ‘More’ then “Account Setup’ on the main Buxfer screen.

Setup Mobile

Buxfer offers a number of different mobile solutions to help you keep up on your finances on the go.  You can use your iPhone, Blackberry or other mobile device that has internet or have it communicate via text messages or via mobile email.  In order to work it via texts, you have to set it up with Twitter.  Being that I don’t have a phone with internet capabilities, nor a Twitter account (I know, I need to get with the times), I skipped this setup section.

I will say, however, that I like that Buxfers offers this many ways to communicate with Buxfer through mobile means.

Apps & Widgets

Buxfer also offers apps and widgets for Facebook, iGoogle, and Netvibes.  Nice.  Can I also put in a quick plug for a future Mac widget? 

Buxfer’s Interface

The Buxfer interface has a very clean, functional look.  Dare I say it reminds me of Gmail a bit (a good thing)?

At the top-left you have your accounts, tags, contacts, and groups.  Here you can add or change settings to these items.

The upper-middle portion of the interface offers different tabs for Summary, Add Transactions, Budgets, Reports, and More.  I’ll go through each one individually to give you an idea of what kind of functionality Buxfer has to offer.

Buxfer’s Accounts

I started with the Accounts screens (what you may consider the Transactions screen) because I needed to first re-categorize (or tag) the transactions that had been downloaded in order to better take advantage of the rest of the features.

The transactions section is pretty straight forward with standard Description, Amount, Balance, Tags, Account, and Date data points.  You can also sort the list by amount or date.  I also like that you can set the number of transactions that show up on the page to 10, 25, or 50.

I noticed that by default it downloaded around 230 transactions (going back about 3 months) from my bank by default.  First of all I wish I could have told it how many transactions or how far back in time to download.  This wouldn’t be that big of deal, however, if I could easily delete the end transactions that I don’t want to have to go through and categorize.    Unfortunately, the only way for me to get to the end of the list (that I can see) is to click the button repeatedly until I get to the end.  A “Go to Page X” option would be nice.

Once I whittled down my transactions list to a manageable 120 transactions, now was the task of re-tagging the transactions to make them actually mean something.

Adding (Custom) Tags

I went to the Tag area (top left, click on the tag icon) to add some custom tags (what you could also call a category) in order to make my budget mine.  Click on the symbol to open the Add Tags window.  Click the again to add a tag.  You can add a sub tag or a parent tag from here.  Relatively straight forward.

Editing Transactions

I went to town re-tagging the transactions.  To be frank I found the process a little more time consuming that I’d like.  It’s not that it’s super slow or that it’s difficult to do.  In fact, all you have to do is click on the “(no tags)” letters, a box pops up and you enter the tag.

As you type, it autofills with the tags you have set up for suggestions.  Very simple.  But it’s just not quite as responsive as I’d like (there’s a half a second delay between clicks).  This may not be a big deal for many of you, I just noticed it more since I was trying to re-tag a boatload of transactions.

I’ll say this much, it was enough for me to delete all of May’s transactions (rather than tag them) and only do June’s just because it took too long.

I do like, however, that you can set a tagging rule so that future similar transactions always are tagged as they’re downloaded.

Renaming Transactions

I also like that you can rename transactions and set rules so that similar transactions in the future will be renamed according to the rules.  See the screenshots for this process.

*Some transactions show up with the date as part of it.  I’m not sure how hard and fast the renaming feature will require the description to be.

General Editing

You can also edit the transaction in a number of different way by click on the description.  Other options include Mark as Transfer, Mark as Refund, Copy, Repeat, Split/Itemize, Attach a Note or File, and Delete.  You can also save/export in a number of file formats by clicking the button at the top right.

Buxfer’s Sychronizing

I feel that I wouldn’t be doing it justice if I didn’t cover, at least for a second, the method that Buxfer uses to synchronize your transactions.

As you can see, near the Synchronize button, it states, “Authentication information is stored offline on your computer.”  From what I’ve read, Buxfer uses the Google Gear’s technology to store your account authentication information on your own computer.  This way, it is more secure and you don’t have to “trust” Buxfer to hold and secure your account information.

There are some who don’t have any problem with services like Mint that hold your account info on their servers.  There are some that do.  For those that get a little nervous of the idea, Buxfer may be a better match for you.

Buxfer also offers two other options.  You can choose to have them sync transactions at night, in which case they will store your account info on their servers.  Or you can use a Firefox plug (Firebux) to do the syncing.

Buxfer’s Summary Tab

Buxfer’s main hub and the area where you’ll land when you first open the site is the Summary tab.  The Summary basically consists of an area showing a budget graph, another area showing your upcoming bills, and one showing an expense pie chart.  Below this top section is a listing of your latest transactions.

You can click the title of each section to be taken to its respective tab.

In the Budget area you can click on each Tag to be taken to that tag’s budget area that shows a spending graph and a list of those transactions.

In the Upcoming Bills area you can click on the title to see a calendar detailing all upcoming bills and to add Reminders.  Or you can click on the bill to edit it’s settings.

In the Monthly Expenses area you can click on the graph to be taken to the Reports area (more on that later).

Buxfer’s Add Transactions

If you choose to manually add transactions, Buxfer allows you to do so in the Add Transaction tab.  This opens a single transaction screen where you can add the details of one transaction at a time.

By click the button you get a screen allowing you add multiple transactions at once.  You can tab through the fields adding virtually all the info without touching your mouse.  This proves to be much faster if you have more than one transaction to add.

In addition, you have the ability to import transactions via a bank export files.  It appears that the following formats are accepted:  .qif, .qfx, .ofx, and .csv.

Buxfer’s Budget

The section that I view as one of the most important sections of any personal finance software is the budgeting area.  I place such importance on the budget because that’s usually the area that has the greatest effect on the spending and saving habits of the users.

So how does Buxfer’s budget stand up to the competition?  Well it depends on who you want to call the competition.  If you compare it to some of the highly effective envelope budgeting systems on the market, Buxfer doesn’t look so hot.  But if you compare it to other similar services (with similar budgeting functionality) like Mint, Quicken Online, iBank, and others, Buxfer is just as good, if not a little better.

Here’s a screenshot of the main budgeting page:

To the left you have the often-seen bar graph that ‘fills up’ as you spend throughout the month.  There is a line that indicated the date so you can see how well you’re doing at that given point in time.  To the right of the graph you have the current balance of the budget in each category (how much you have left to spend), your set limit, a rollover amount, and how much you’ve spent.

To the far right you can delete a budget for a category or pause it.  When I tried to pause one, however, it looks like it simply deleted it. Maybe they’re still working on that one.

The Rollover Budget Option

The reason that I like Buxfer’s budget better than some others is because Buxfer has the Rollover feature.

It looks as though they’re trying to take a page from the envelope budgeting methodology and include a feature that “rolls over” your budget balances from the previous month.

For example, if I have a monthly budget for Entertainment of $30 and I only spend $15 in May on Entertainment, then the following month I will have $45 to spend.  Likewise, if I have a $30 budget for Personal Care, but I spent $50 in May, then in June I only have $10 that I can spend (because a negative $20 was rolled over from last month).  See the screenshots for how this would look in Buxfer.

This feature has an envelope taste to it, and I like it.  It makes you more responsible for your spending, helps you to plan better, and allows you to build up amounts in anticipation of a large, future expense.  (Although it doesn’t do it near as well as YNAB does, I like that they are trying to implement the same ideas).

Unfortunately, however, Buxfer doesn’t facilitate nor encourage creating a zero-based budget (where you budget for every single dollar you earn).  This is a much more effective way to plan your spending and savings.

Dig Deeper

By clicking on each of the individual Tags in your budget you can dig deeper.  It opens up a Tags tab which shows you all of the transactions as well as a graph showing your expenses for that particular Tag.

Buxfer’s Reports

The Reports section of Buxfer consists of three different reports: An Income pie chart, an Expense pie char, and a Balance line graph.  By clicking on each section, you are shown only that graph and the transactions that pertain to the graph below.

As expected, you can click on sections (Tags) of the two pie charts (income and expenses) to drill down and see what expenses and transactions make up that section of the pie.  Pretty standard.

The Balance graph shows what your balance (the amount of money you have) has been on any given day.  Some may find it interesting to watch their balance go up and down with paychecks and expenses, but I didn’t see much use of it.

Track IOU’s with Friends

Buxfer has a pretty neat feature that some (especially that college aged) may find quite handy.  You can track what is owed to you, and what you owe others, through the Buxfer system.  It appears as though you need to invite friends in order to get them in the system to begin tracking the IOUs.

You can also receive a $1 credit towards membership upgrades for every friend that you refer.

Being that I don’t currently have any friends in the system, I’m unable to test this feature right now.  If anyone wants to become my friend, please let me know.

The Need to Upgrade

While I was setting up my budget in Buxfer I came across this error message:

I was on my 5th or 6th Tag on my budget when I got the prompt to upgrade.  I initially thought that I would be able to get away with quite a bit without having to upgrade, but this made me second guess.

I can certainly see Buxfer’s need to monetize their system.  And there will definitely be those who think that it’s worth the $1.79 or $2.79 per month.

I would have originally suggested that you just use the free version, but I believe that in order to have any kind of effective budget, you will need to budget WAY more than only 5 categories (ideally all of your spending would budgeted).  As such, I say if you’re going to seriously use Buxfer, you need to upgrade.

Is it worth the money?  Read the conclusion:

Buxfer Overall Conclusion

As a free tool, Buxfer is great.  It has nice functionality that goes a bit beyond other free solutions.  I like it’s budgeting function better than similarly designed systems, but it still pales in comparison to true envelope budgeting systems available.

I also like that Buxfer allows you to store your bank account information offline (on your computer) which seems a bit more secure than options like Mint.

If you’re going to use Buxfer as your main budgeting engine, than I highly suggest that you pay for the upgrades in order to actually make a budget that will have any kind of effect on your spending.  Looking from the standpoint that you’re paying for it (although it’s certianly not a lot), I don’t know that it’s worth it.   You can find much better solutions (that use true envelope and zero-based budgeting) on the market for a little more than a one year’s subscription to Buxfer’s upgraded options.  There are however, many that will likely find Buxfer a refreshing alternative to other free personal finance software solutions.