Personal Finance Software Reviews

MySpendingPlan^TM is a free, online personal finance software application that promises to help you “Plan Better,” “Save More,” and “Live Smart.” Certainly we could all do with little more of each of these.

So how does MySpendingPlan^TM stand up to the other online personal finance packages that offer their services (some for free as well)?  This review will walk you through the online budgeting system to help you get a better feel for what MySpendingPlan^TM has to offer.

My Experience with MySpendingPlan

The MySpendingPlan.com website is very clean and professional. Something I certianly hope will carry over into the software. The home page gives you some great insights in to how MySpendingPlan^TM can help you accomplish your goals to plan better, save more, and live smarter.

If you’d like, you may want to take a tour of the program by clicking Take a Tour at the top of the screen. While the ‘tour’ doesn’t really show you much of the actual software, it does help you to get a feel for MySpendingPlan^TM by highlighting a number of of it’s features.

Setting up MySpendingPlan

Signing up for a free account if fairly painless. A quick click on the Free Sign Up link and you’re on your way. After entering in a few pieces of personal information (not yet sure why they require a zip code, but they do), you’re told that a welcome email will be sent to your shortly.

The email, by the way, ended up in my junk box so you may want to check there and add it to your safe list. Aside from a Sign in link, the email didn’t provide much besides a few special offers that they want you to check out.

You can start immediately however, by clicking on the Go to My Account link at the bottom. Before going to your account, however, you’re given this screen:

I’m not even into the actual program yet and I’m already seeing advertisements (this particular one wants me to connect me to a realtor to sell my house). While I expected some ads and/or recommendations (they do, after all, have to make some money somehow to provide the service), the fact that it was so soon and so intrusive surprised me a bit.

Hopefully this is something that won’t be too intrusive in the future. They have a large green button titled Get Started, but don’t get confused. That is the button to continue with their ad’s service. The button to continue with your MySpendingPlan^TM account is at the bottom in much smaller letters.

Create a New Spending Plan

When creating a new spending plan you can name it and choose the ‘template.’ Your two options are Home Finances and Life Events. I chose Home Finances since I will be setting up a personal budget rather than planning for a specific event.

This screen also has it’s fair share of ads, both in link and image format: I’m getting the impression that this program might be fairly ad heavy.

To complete the setup of your new spending plan, you’ll go through 7 different steps: Intro, Interview, Accounts, Income Sources, Envelopes & Groups, Bills, Envelope Budgeting, and Assign Money.

Interview

The first question in the “Interview” asks you when was the last time that you reviewed your insurance needs. Ah, here come the opportunities for them to upsell you to services.

Interestingly enough, the second question asked about checking accounts. After entering that I already have a checking account, it suggests that open a free checking account with Washington Mutual.

For those that don’t know, Washington Mutual no longer exists — it was bought by JP Morgan Chase Bank almost a whole year ago. While not a big deal, this doesn’t exactly instil much confidence in MySpendingPlan^TM.

Other questions that it asked were focused on saving acounts, mortgages, selling or buying a home, etc.

Accounts

The Accounts sections is pretty straight forward.  In a pretty intuitive way, you simply add the bank accounts that you have.

For those who don’t like to have third parties know their financial information (like bank account numbers), you’ll be glad to know that MySpendingPlan^TM doesn’t ask for them.

Income Sources

In the same manner as before, you’ll then enter all the sources of your family’s income.

You must enter the date of the next paycheck, a title, the amount, and then choose the frequency that that paycheck will be coming in (monthly, weekly, etc.). You are also able to add notes if you desire to do so.

Groups & Envelopes

The next setup step is to create all of your spending groups and envelopes. Groups are major categories of spending (e.g. Food) and Envelopes are more specific categories of spending within the Groups (e.g. Groceries).

I actually like this section quite a bit. It allows you to create your own custom envelopes that work best for you. This is a key part to any effective budgeting software — the ability to create and manage spending categories that are tailored to your personal spending habits.

MySpendingPlan^TM offers a good number of existing groups and envelopes for you to work with (which you can edit), but you can also add your own by clicking New Group or New Envelope at the bottom of the screen if needed.

I received an error (see the screenshots below) when adding a new envelope that said I had to have a budget amount for the envelope. I had assumed that the assigning of budget amounts would be in a later step since it didn’t require me to set a budget amount when I was editing the other envelopes. Perhaps a small glich?

A Note About Speed – When you click just about anything within MySpendingPlan^TM there is about a 2 to 4 second delay before the action is completed. During the delay you see this icon: . I grew to hate that icon.This delay became very painful as I was editing only a few different envelopes. It was slow enough, that I even checked my internet connection to see if I didn’t have a good connection (but the connection was strong).

I don’t know if this delay is going to be standard for every click or if it is only apparent during these setup steps, but if it continues it will be a HUGE let down and probably enough for me to never use the program.

*Update: I noticed throughout the application that not all clicks had such a long delay (but most of them did). The drop down boxes, for example, had no delay at all.

Bills

Here you can enter all of your “fixed” bills or expenses that you know that you’ll have each month, week, etc.

While this step is certainly easy and intuitive within the software, I personally found it a bit tedious after a while. Part of this was due to the delay between clicks and the completion of the action (about 2 seconds).

Hopefully, however, this is something that will save a good amount of time once it’s set up properly.

Envelope Budgeting

In this section you set your monthly budget for all your different envelopes or spending categories.

*A Note about Envelope Budgeting – This is certianly something that MySpendingPlan^TM has done right. The time-tested budgeting method knows and envelope budgeting is probably the most effective way to manage your finances. The act of putting certain amounts of money into different envelopes (with either physical money or tracking it electronically) and then spending out of those “envelopes” encourages you to 1. plan your budget well and then 2. hold yourself responsible for all spending that occurs. I’ve found that this action alone has the greatest affect on personal spending and the way we manage our finances.

MySpendingPlan^TM allows you to enter your budget amounts in two different ways: manually or with their Auto-Assign feature. If you choose to do it manually, you simply type in your budget amounts on the right side of the screen. You can tab between entries, BUT you still have to wait through the “refresh” delay (about 2 to 3 seconds) before moving on the next one. I tried to tab through them quickly while editing the amounts, but once the refresh was over, it changed all the newly edited numbers back to what they were before. This was extremely annoying.

You can avoid this headache by deleting the envelopes you know you wont use. But either way, you’re spending time waiting for the “refresh” delay while deleting envelopes or when entering your budget amounts.

I also chose to try out the Auto-Assign feature. My results were less than stellar, although this may be partly my fault. In the envelope setup section, I didn’t delete all of the envelopes that I don’t use. Had I only included envelopes that I use, the Auto budget may have worked out a bit better. As it stands, it budgeted either $1, $60, or $100 for almost every category (except for Bills since I already set an amount for those).

I don’t, for example, think I need to budget $100 each month on Shoes, but only $60 each month of Auto Fuel. Basically you’re going to need to go over each envelope and set individual amounts anyway.

This is not a bad thing since it wouldn’t really be your budget if you didn’t set it anyway right? The Auto-Assign feature might work better in future months (if it goes off of your past spending habits), but I don’t see why you would use it to start out with.

MySpendingPlan^TM does encourage you to use a zero-based budget (allocating each dollar of your income to expense). This is a very effective way to budget, forcing you to have plan for each dollar that comes into and out of your pocket.

Assign Money

The seventh and final step is to assign the funds from your income to the budgets that you just set for the month.

MySpendingPlan^TM explains that the figures you enter in this step will be remembered for a “funding template” that can be used in the future to fund the envelopes more quickly and easily.

Just as before, you can choose to enter the numbers manually or by using the Auto-Assign Money button. The entering of the data in the section, however, is MUCH easier and quicker than in the envelope budgeting section. Here you can tab through the boxes and enter the data without any delay at all.

I again tried the Auto-Assign feature. I found that the system did auto-assign some allocations for certain paychecks correctly, but other’s didn’t make much sense. For example, it said I should use $100 from our first paycheck of the month to pay for my electricity bill (good because it’s due on the 10th). But it also said that I shouldn’t use any money from my first paycheck for groceries for the month (bad because we need to eat food to survive the first 15 days of the month).

I also noticed that when changing the numbers around, the ‘remaining’ number didn’t change accordingly (probably just a small bug).

Fund the Envelopes

After the initial setup steps, you are asked to fund your envelopes.

Again, you can do it manually or have MySpendingPlan^TM do it for you using the ‘funding templates’ that you just set up.

A Small Bug – When I tried to have them Auto-Fund the envelopes, I got the following two errors on different pages. When I tried to select which template to use:

I then went back a page and got this error when I clicked the Auto-Fund button for the second time:

I should note that MySpendingPlan^TM is still in Beta, so some errors and bugs like these are to be somewhat expected. After clicking Transactions > Fund Envelopes at the top, I was then able to successfully fund the envelopes.

A Overview of MySpendingPlan.com

The main view in MySpendingPlan^TM is something called My Big Picture.  At the top, you have icons for other areas including My Big Picture, Setup Wizard, Envelopes, Accounts, Income Sources, Bills, Tasks, Shopping Lists, Savings Goals, and Reports.

The Setup Wizard, Income Sources, and Bills are essentially the same as when we used them set them up so we wont go over those.  We will, however, briefly go over each of the others to give you an overall view of what MySpendingPlan^TM has to offer.

My Big Picture

My Big Picture, as the name suggests is a dashboard of sorts that displays all your information in one place.  Here’s a screenshot:

Here you can see your envelope balances and your spending for each.  You can also see your bank account balances, upcoming bills, tasks in progress, savings goals, news, a chart (I got an error instead of a chart), and of course, a Save More box (their opportunity to make money through ads) along with a couple other items.

I like that you can edit what shows up to a certain degree.  I thought I read somewhere that you can move these boxes around, but I couldn’t get it to work.  You can, however, minimize or close boxes that you don’t want showing up.  They don’t allow you, however, to close the Save More box.  Not a big surprise.

In general, I’m not too impressed with what I’m seeing here. It provides a couple good pieces of information (mostly your spending), but you really can’t do much from this screen.

Accounts

The Accounts area lets you actually edit your accounts and transactions.  By hovering over an account, you can choose to edit your account or view, edit, or create transactions.  Since this is where you’ll spend a good chunk of your time, let’s take a look at it:

Not much to look at yet, but we’ll change that.  It looks like you can change the date range to view as well as how many transactions to show on a page (a nice feature).

What I wasn’t too impressed with, however, was the Kontera add that was embedded in the page.  You know those sites that have those (in my opinion) really annoying advertisement links that pop up as you scroll over them?  It looks like MySpendingPlan^TM is using them as a source of income:

If an ad for “Account Balance” information isn’t helpful, I don’t know what is.  (I hope you can sense my sarcasm.)

Adding Trasactions

Adding and editing transactions in MySpendingPlan^TM is very simple.  But again, just because it’s easy to do, doesn’t mean that it’s effective or efficient. On average, each transaction took me about 30 seconds to enter in.  And that was only entering in the minimum requirements (date, payee, amount and envelope).  That information should be able to be entered in about 5 seconds (at least it’s that way with many other effective personal finance software applications).

It takes longer to add a transactions for two main reasons: 1. more clicks than necessary are required to complete a transactions entry and 2. there’s the now all-to-familiar delay between clicks and completion of the action.  For example, here’s a compilation of different screenshots  (of the “delay circle”) that I took while entering only 1 transaction:

I hope that I’m making my point clear.  Editing transactions in MySpendingPlan^TM is simply to tedious and time consuming.

Envelopes

While this is fairly self explanatory, I thought I’d cover it anyway.  The Envelopes area shows your envelopes with their corresponding Budgets, Payments, Deposits, and Balances.  You also have a little bar graph that, I assume, fills up as you spend through the month (although I’ve entered a few transactions for this month and don’t see anything).

Tasks

Next is the Task Planner.  Not much to mention here either, other than it could help you keep track of your tasks if you put them into the system.  While this isn’t a groundbreaking feature, it’s a nice one to have.

Shopping Lists

…is Coming Soon!  I’ll be sure to update this section when MySpendingPlan^TM has it up and running.

Savings Goals

This is one area that I like.  It allows you to set specific savings goals and tracks your progress towards it.  For example, I put in mine that I want to have $10,000 saved up in my House Down Payment envelope by December 15th.  There’s a Spending Ticker (bar graph) that shows your progress.

Savings goals in this sections should also show up in the My Big Picture area as well.

Reports

The Reports area of MySpendingPlan^TM has two main categories for it’s reports:  Income and Spending Reports and Bills and Tasks Reports.  There are a total of 10 different reports.

Here’s some screenshots of the reports.

I couldn’t get the view to change at all, despite my efforts at changing the Change Zoom settings.  As such I had to scroll to see much/any data.  Again, something I’m sure they’ll fix before getting out of Beta (or maybe it just doesn’t like Firefox as a browser).   Also, the reports come in either Report (table) form, a pie graph, or a bar graph.  The bar graphs look like basic Excel-produced graphs.

In short, the Reports section left much to be desired.

MySpendingPlan Price

The main thing that MySpendingPlan^TM has going for it is the price.  MySpendingPlan^TM is completely free.

MySpendingPlan Ads

After reading this review and seeing all the screenshots, you may not feel that the MySpendingPlan^TM ads is that big of deal (and it may not be).  But I should point out that the screenshots throughout this review didn’t include any of the ads.  For that reason I thought it prudent to show you the influence that the advertisements will have when using MySpendingPlan^TM.

Here’s a screenshot of a typical page:

The areas in red are advertisement areas (the area on the right is often a picture or motion ad as well).  This may, or may not bother you.  There were also some other areas containing ads:

• A Save More area at the top of the My Big Picture page.
• The “interview” when you first setup (this is nothing more than an opportunity to refer you to different services).
• The large advertisement for connecting to Realtor when you first signed up.
• The Kontera ads in the text (I only saw this once, so I don’t know how much they’ll use it).

Now, I’m not saying that MySpendingPlan^TM shouldn’t offer these advertisements.  If it weren’t for revenue that they made off of these ads, they wouldn’t be able to provide the software for free.

But I personally think that MySpendingPlan^TM is too ad heavy for the functionality that you’re getting.  It almost seems as though they’ve focused more on getting the ads in front of you than on creating a truly effective and quick solution to help you manage your finances better.

Conclusion

MySpendingPlan^TM offers their online personal finance software for free — but it comes with a price: time and a lot of advertisements.

While the budgeting methodology that MySpendingPlan^TM uses (the envelope-based budget), the overall offering of MySpendingPlan^TM is inferior to many other solutions on the market.  The main complaint I had about MySpendingPlan^TM is the fact that almost every action took considerably longer than it should have.  This longer time is a result of a nasty delay after the click of the mouse (in many instances) and the fact that the way you enter data (transactions for example) is simply takes too many clicks of the mouse to perform.  In short, the user interface needs quite a bit of improvements in order for it to be quick and effective.

The thought did enter my mind a couple times, however, that considering that their revenue comes from advertisments that you see while using the program, it could be possible that they don’t necessarily want you to do your work quickly.  The longer you spend in their program, the more face time their advertisments get.  Just a thought.

As mentioned above, MySpendingPlan^TM offers a good deal of ads — too many for my tasts.  And while, for the most part, they weren’t overly intrusive, I got the feeling that MySpendingPlan^TM was first an ad generator and second a personal finance tool to help you budget better and more effectively.

They’re still in Beta, so I’m sure many improvements are yet to be made.  I look forward to seeing some of those improvements.  But for now, I’d recommend looking elsewhere.  I see no reason to recommend MySpendingPlan^TM over other free services, especially with the latest improvements that Mint’s made (custom categories, better budget, better graphs, unintrustive ads, etc.)

**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.