1/6/2024 0 Comments Moneydance vs quickenIf you require these features, you may want to consider another application. It doesn’t have any year-end tax reports or any easy way to determine the current value of all your assets. Unfortunately, aside from these very basic printed reports, Budget’s reporting capabilities are pretty thin. If you select the window’s Table view, you can quickly see an envelope’s deposits and expenses, as well as the total percentage of your income that a particular envelope is eating up. Selecting a group envelope and then clicking on the Stats button brings up a window in which you can view either a bar graph or a line graph of that specific group’s expenses. This useful feature keeps the program from getting visually disorganized, which could be a problem if you have a large number of envelopes.īudget includes very few reporting tools, but it does give you a quick overview of your current financial status. Once you’ve created a group, you can easily add existing envelopes to it by dragging and dropping them on top of the group. So if you want to keep your telephone, gas, electric, and water bills in one place, you can create a Utility envelope that contains separate envelopes for each of your utilities. To help you organize similar items, Budget allows you to create group envelopes, which contain a collection of other envelopes. The beauty of Budget - and the way it differs from other financial programs - is that it actually shows you how much money you have available to spend, as opposed to showing your current bank balance. For example, if your rent is $1,000 per month and you get paid $700 per week, Budget drops $250 into the Rent envelope every time you get paid. If you have regular expenses such as auto insurance or rent, Budget will automatically distribute a portion of your paycheck to the proper envelope each time you get paid. Every time you spend money, Budget transfers it from your available income envelope to the appropriate expense envelope. To set up your budget within Budget, you create envelopes for your bank accounts and each of your expense categories. Unlike most programs, which use a ledgerlike check-register metaphor, Budget uses a conceptually vivid envelope metaphor, providing the digital equivalent of cashing your paycheck and then distributing the money to different expense envelopes. Of all the programs we looked at, Snowmint Creative Solutions’ Budget 4.3.3 was the most unique. So as good as the program is for people in the earliest stages of saving, it’s not currently capable of expanding to meet growing financial needs. Beginning budgeters don’t usually need to print checks and import bank transactions, but if you’re setting up your first real bank account, being unable to reconcile PigMoney’s account data with your monthly bank statement is a serious problem. PigMoney has no check-printing capabilities, includes no way to balance a checkbook, and, like many of the programs we looked at, made importing financial information we downloaded from a real bank account a frustrating experience. However, this isn’t a problem for finance amateurs with simple budgets. If you have many different expenses, the expense list often ends up disappearing behind the corresponding pie chart. The amount of information in the window can swamp PigMoney’s interface. As you enter each new transaction, a small window displays a list of expense categories sorted by the amount spent below that is a pie chart detailing each of your expenses by category. PigMoney has an autocomplete feature similar to Quicken’s it remembers items you’ve entered and enters them automatically as you begin to type them again. You create new transactions in PigMoney by clicking on one of the program’s three main transaction buttons - New, Edit, and Delete - and then entering details, such as payment amount, payee, and category, in the transaction window that appears.
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