Simple Home Budget is on sale until September 15, 2008! Buy now only for $19!
The most recent version, 1.4.2, is available for download! Try exciting features Simple Home Budget offers now and also enjoy many new benefits in the next release!
We are working right now on new features, many of our users asked for. If you buy Simple Home Budget today, you will get all new features soon for free - all Simple Home Budget updates are free of charge!
Simple Home Budget 1.4.2 was released today, August 24, 2008 and available for download from the download page.
The main feature in this release - YTD (Year-to-date) Columns are added to the Categories view. Now you can see your spending habits from whole year perspective. When we looked at our data with YTD columns, we were just shocked by the numbers on some categories 
, so we think it will be valuable feature addition for you too.
Another feature added in this release - daily totals in the Transactions view. You will see total expenses, income or refunds for specific day at the bottom of the Transactions view. We were also shocked by how much money we usually spend on Saturdays (our regular shopping days).
Simple Home Budget 1.4.0 was released yesterday, August 19, 2008 (available for download at the download page.)
The main feature added in this release - multiple budget files. Now you can divide the stream of your transactions - for example if you want track home and home business expenses and income separately (or you and your spouse each have home business and would like to keep records separately.
Also added new schedule type for recurring transactions - now you schedule transactions also with four weeks interval.
As usual, to update Simple Home Budget, proceed to the download page, and follow installer’s steps.
Expected totals (you find them under Actual totals on the sidebar of the main form) are great feature of Simple Home Budget. How great? You will know if you have enough money for all regular expenses for any future month (or the rest of the current month), and also how much money you will have left for the current or any other future month for unexpected expenses shopping.
From where does Simple Home Budget get expected totals? It calculates expected totals using the schedule of recurring transactions. That’s why having recurring transactions entered is so important (and it’s also saves you time from entering the same transaction more than one time). So by having recurring transactions entered you will get the following benefits:
Simple Home Budget is really a simple, but also very powerful tool. Some features are not ‘right on surface’, still become very helpful when you start using Simple Home Budget more and more. Today we would like to bring your attention to recurring transactions - what is it, how recurring transaction is different from regular transaction (it’s not a transaction actually, just a prospect for future transactions), how to use effectively (any transaction that repeated more than once, can be entered only once and recurred after).
The “Transactions” tab shows actual transactions that did happen.
The “Recurring” tab shows only a “schedule” for transactions that will occur by schedule. Any recurring transaction has the “next” date field. When scheduled date happens, actual transaction is generated from recurring, and presented to you for approval. When you approve this transaction (could be a few, depending how behind you are by the schedule), it will be actually created as transaction and shown in the “Transactions” tab. Any actual transaction (”Transactions” tab) generated from the recurring has italic font to inform you that this is generated from recurring schedule).
You will not see any “not released yet” transactions in the “Transactions” tab, but they will be used to calculate “expected” income and expenses for selected month.
Let me show everything by a simple example. Let’s say you have weekly income every Thursday and mortgage payments every two weeks on Friday. Let’s say, for June 2008, your first pay is on June 5, 2008, and your mortgage payment is on June 13, 2008 (that’s how you setup recurring transactions, just setup start (next) date for some point of time and select schedule, that’s it). From now on every time you start Simple Home Budget, if time for some schedule has come, you will be asked to approve generated transaction from it. There are a lot of other details, but I will skip them for now.
Your initial setup will look like this in the “Recurring” tab.
When you create these records, click on “Save” button instead of “Save&Process” for now, so you can reproduce what I’m doing now. Now close Simple Home Budget, and start it again (like the time just passed few days, and you start Simple Home Budget on June 16).
As you can see, mortgage payment next date has come, and two pay checks (June 5, June 12) for the last two weeks.
The approval form allows you to review generated transactions, approve them (check boxes), edit them (double click on transaction), and most important step - create ACTUAL transactions (the “Proceed” button).
After you click “Proceed” button, the “Transactions” tab will look like below.
All three transactions are in italic, because they are generated from schedule.
See also numbers on the sidebar. You will see Actual income and expenses so far for this month. Now let’s take a look at the recurring tab.
As you can see, next paycheck is June 19, and next mortgage payment June 27. After or on June 19 you will be asked to approve this paycheck, as well as after or on June 26 another one, and also approve mortgage payment after or on June 27.
What is important, you can see expected income and expenses for June already today, June 16 in the “expected” tab on the side bar (two paycheck and one mortgage payment). Your total expected net income for June is (600+600-500 + 600+600-500 = 1400).
Recurring transactions should help you with transactions happen on regular basis (your paycheck, scheduled payments, etc.), but they are not ACTUAL transactions, just a TOOL to generate them.
Regular life of conscious but impulse buyer is full of refunds. Also sometimes we are trying to save and buy cheaper, and have to return that wonderful stuff and get our money back next day (usually buy on Saturday and return on Sunday, and buy something else on Sunday, and return next Saturday). And another reason for a refund is mysterious ‘mail in rebate’ thing - you pay for the stuff first (sometimes there is also ‘instant rebate’ that you don’t pay, but observe), and then after two or three months you will get some of your money back ( sometimes you don’t get any money even after four months of waiting, and sometimes if you call magic number and speak to magic person, you get you mail in rebate after another one or two months).
Anyway, any Refund is a expense with a ‘minus’ in front of it. So should Simple Home Budget just tell you to enter an expense transaction with minus in front of its amount and call it done? Yes, you can go this way, but create a refund transaction will make everything much nicer:
Simple Home Budget is very simple application to manage your finances. Still under the simplicity of Simple Home Budget you will find our efforts to give you abilities to work fast and effective with your finances.
Simple Home Budget provides you the transaction entry form right on the sidebar of the main form. This form should be mainly used to enter your expenses, and it also designed to accept other transactions like your income (much more important than expenses!) or refunds (refunds are really an additional income for some of us, and saved dollar cost twice than earned one). To enter income or refund, just look for the radio-buttons right under the calendar (please see the screenshot below).
Note: Categories for expenses and income are different. So the drop-down list for categories is changing when you change transaction type from “Expense” to “Income”. What is reason for it? To make it easier for you. When you enter you income transactions, you don’t need to see categories like ‘Car gas’, or ‘Mortgage’, right? That was the idea of this separation.
What about refunds? Refunds categories list is the same as for expenses, so you can refund your expenses.
Simple Home Budget is designed to accept information from you in the easiest possible way, so you just enter dat quick and fast. When it comes to edit already existing information, Simple Home Budget provides easy access too, maybe one more click away.
When new category has to be entered, you just have to select “Add new…” form the dropdown category list anywhere you can see that category dropdown list. But let say you want to edit a category just entered with a typo, or you decided to change category name to more descriptive. How you can this? There is no ‘edit’ button anywhere around…
The answer is on the “Categories” tab. This tab provides you with summary for all categories for the current (or selected) month, and it also gives you tools to edit (or even delete) categories.
Please see the screenshot below to see how to edit categories.
Simple Home Budget 1.3.1 was released yesterday, June 12, 2008 with new feature (optional end date for recurring transactions) and some important bug fixes, as well as additional user interface improvements.
New version is available for download at http://www.home-budget-software.com/download.
This is quick addition to the 1.2 release. Defeated some minor internal bugs and done some small interface improvements - now it Simple Home Budget remembers the chart width and the height of the bottom grid in the Categories section.
Ready for download.
