Simple Home Budget Blog » features

Simple Home Budget in Greek

Sergiy — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:40:01 +0000

Simple Home Budget is now available in Greek. To change a language (or see the full list of languages available), simply select Settings->Language in the main menu.

To update Simple Home Budget to the latest version with Greek translation, select Help->Check for updates… in the main menu.

The latest version is also available from the download page.Similar Posts:

How Can I Carry Over The Net Income Left In Previous Month?

Sergiy — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:30:38 +0000

The answer is simple: No need to do that.

Net income is the difference between income and expenses for selected month. Running total is the difference between income and expenses for all time before and including selected month. So “carry over” function is in Running Total, not Net Income. By “carrying over” manually Net Income from previous month, you create unreal transaction and alter your real income for next month.Similar Posts:

Comparing To Spreadsheet software

Sergiy — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:27:08 +0000

To clean a carrot, you can use usual knife to cut everything else and just scrub it until the carrot is clean. Or you can use a special knife and have every carrot you ever decide to cook perfectly clean easy and fast. The choice is yours.

Simple Home Budget is very simple (but still very useful) and very small application. You may use Excel or Open Office or other spreadsheet program to track your finances. So did we! Our first expense tracker was created in Excel and it lived with us for few months. Until we decided to create small and useful tool Simple Home Budget to the routine excel work from us.

Generic spreadsheet application is designed to help with anything related to numbers, tables, sum calculations, etc. You are the main part of your budget routine.

Do a simple exercise – track how much time per month you spent managing your finances. Multiply this time by your rate per hour. Now multiply this number by 12. This is the cost of your time managing your finances per year. Now try the same with Simple Home Budget and see how much time you spent for one month. Get the difference. Use small fraction of this difference to buy Simple Home Budget, or even get it free, keep the difference.

Simple Home Budget has many simple and useful features designed to help you manage your finances without much distraction:

Automatic monthly view (no need to create new spreadsheet every month)
Recurring transactions that create transactions for your based on different schedules
Expected income and expenses based on different recurring schedules (your budget without budgeting)
Running total
Self-learning (in assigning categories) import from your bank statements

Download and try Simple Home Budget for free for 30 days and decide which way is easier and cost less for you.Similar Posts:

Delete Transactions in Bulk

Sergiy — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:18:42 +0000

Simple Home Budget 1.7.0 was released on January 28, 2009 with many internal improvements and bug fixes. This release was planned as bug-fixing release, still it adds some useful features.

A few users requested to delete transactions for certain period of time (let’s say all transactions in 2008). For this reason Simple Home Budget offer the Bulk Delete form available through the main menu (select Tools and then Delete Transactions). The form asks for two dates to determine a date range for transactions that should be deleted. Simple Home Budget provides number of transactions to be deleted during the confirmation request and also offers optional backup before the deletion.

Simple Home Budget Lite was also updated to version 1.7.0 and more stable than previous versions.

To update Simple Home Budget, simply select in the main menu “Help”, and then “Check for Updates…”. Simple Home Budget will download and start the installer – you have to just follow usual steps in the installer. There is no need to uninstall existing version.

For existing registered users this update is free.

Other way to download Simple Home Budget is to proceed to the download page.Similar Posts:

Extended Pie Chart and Easy Category Delete

Sergiy — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:31:16 +0000

Simple Home Budget 1.6.7 (proceed to the download page or just select “Help”-”Check for updates…” from the main menu) was released today with exciting new features:

Extended Pie Chart
Easy Category Delete Dialog

In addition, this release has some small but annoying bug fixes, that have been hunted for a while, and finally understood and resolved.

Extended Pie Chart

Now you can customize your expenses pie chart:

See the expenses pie chart for current month or Year-To-Date (YTD) for selected month
Show numbers by categories or category groups
See Top 10 only or all categories/groups

Easy Delete Category

Categories were hard to delete before, if you have any regular or recurring transaction assigned to a category you want to delete. You had to find all transactions in previous month and assign them to another category. Now, Simple Home Budget can do it for you, so deleting category is no longer a hassle.

Now, when you will try to delete a category and you have transactions assigned to this category, Simple Home Budget will ask to which category you would like to assign transactions. Then all regular and recurring transactions will be reassigned and the category will be deleted.

Important Fixes

The release provides small but important fixes for reported bugs. Thank you very much for sending us the bug reports!

Download or Update

Simple Home Budget can be updated from from the main menu (select Help and then Check for updates…), or you can download from the download page. You don’t have uninstall existing version, just install new one.Similar Posts:

Import QIF Bank Files

Sergiy — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:31:44 +0000

Simple Home Budget 1.6.5 was released today with added QIF import support. QIF and QFX formats are quite different, and some banks still provide statements for download in QIF only format.

You can update Simple Home Budget right from the main menu (Help->Check For Updates…) (for versions starting from 1.6.3). Older versions can be easily updated through the download page.Similar Posts:

Pie Chart for Monthly Expenses

Sergiy — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:34:50 +0000

Simple Home Budget 1.6.4 brings you few great features:

Pie Chart for your monthly expenses
Easy-to-select existing colors for categories

Few users asked about pie charts in Simple Home Budget, and we suggested in past to use descending sort for the “Out” column in the Categories tab to get “Top 10″ of your expenses – it’s still a very powerful feature – you will be shocked to your Top 10 for the first month of using Simple Home Budget. You will be even more shocked to see you “Year To Date Top 10″ (just sort the “YTD Out” column and do it in December).

However, we did feel some magnitude towards pie charts everywhere, so we decided to follow our users suggestions, and give Simple Home Budget some decent pie chart too.

How the pie chart is prepared:

All your monthly expenses are sorted in descending order (Top 10 again!)
If the number of categories exceeds 10, then categories with 5% or less from total expenses for selected month will be grouped to the ‘Other’ slice

Following these rules, the pie chart will show you your most expense categories, and grouping small categories will help to prevent the pie from being overcrowded.

Another nice feature available in Simple Home Budget 1.6.4 – easy-to-select existing category colors:

Let’s say you selected some nice custom color, and now you want to apply the same color to other category – for sure it will be not easy to repeat your color selection again. Now all existing category colors are available to choose from! Just click on color rectangle on the category edit form and have all existing color available under “Custom Colors” section.

Simple Home Budget 1.6.4 is available for download. Try in now free for 30 days (or get it free), and let us know how much money you saved after just one month!

Similar Posts:

Category groups, Monthly/YTD statements and more in Simple Home Budget 1.6.3

Sergiy — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:54:08 +0000

Simple Home Budget 1.6.3 was released last week. The main features in this release:

Category Groups
Updated Monthly/YTD category statements with category grouping
Added context menus everywhere and available by right click
Improved search option (just start typing while browsing your transactions or categories)
Release recurring transactions on hold with one click

Category Groups

Now you can specify a category group for each category.

Category groups allow you to get extra information in your monthly and YTD reports. For example, Car, Gas, Car Insurance, Car Finance categories may be grouped to a ‘Transportation’ group. Your water, hydro, natural gas, and other related to your house expenses maybe grouped to a ‘House’ category (it’s a good opportunity to compare the monthly fee in condo with house real ‘monthly’ fee.

Unlike categories themselves, groups are free to type in. Simple Home Budget will still offer you dropdown list of all existing groups, so you can select existing group or just type in new one.

On the “Categories” tab you will see new column “Group”, that you can sort as any other column just by clicking on the column header.

Updated Monthly/YTD category statements with category grouping

The category report (see on right), will use the category groups and provide with additional monthly/YTD subtotals for each group. Previous category report is available as the “Summary” report.

Right click context menus

Simple Home Budget has added few useful right click menu to do everything you need right on spot.

For example, edit just added categories on the sidebar:

Or change a transaction’s category and do everything else with transaction just by doing the right click over transactions grid:

Or a category:

Improved search option

Now you can just start typing while you scrolling transactions or categories to do a search – no need to do extra click on the search text box. That’s it. To make everything even more easy, fast and comfortable in Simple Home Budget.

Release recurring transactions on hold with one click

If you have recurring transactions on hold that should be released, you can now release them with one click on the ‘Process Today’ button. For example, you buy almost every five days 10-ride bus tickets, but you don’t buy them exactly every week – sometimes you don’t ride them every day, so it’s good idea to put this recurring transaction on hold and release when you actually buy the tickets. The ‘process today’ button let’s you process the recurring transaction on hold with current date.

Simple Home Budget 1.6.3 is available for free download. You can install it and try fully functional for 30 days.Similar Posts:

Recurring Everything Possible = Have a Complete Budget

Sergiy — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:32:02 +0000

Last month we completed for ourselves what we keep suggesting to you, Simple Home Budget users – to have every possible expense you can think of, that occurring on regular basis – once a week, twice a month, every other month, etc. The schedule for each recurring expense does not have to be exact, you can always setup recurring transactions with ‘on hold’ flag set. What is the result from this setup? Your expected total numbers are really close to actual expenses as the time goes by – meaning that you do in fact have a budget… without budgeting!

And from month to month, your expected numbers will change – the schedule for each recurring transaction could be different for every month (something weekly, something bi-weekly, something semi-monthly, etc., something once in three months), so your budgeting table will always a thing to correct and work on every month. With expected totals, you really have this budget table (expected expenses) self-adjusting based on the recurring schedules.

We are very pleased with this feature for our own finances – everything is under control now – what we are expecting this month, when the due date for specific bill (or where is that bill, that suppose to arrive already?).

Long story short – try to add everything you can think of your expenses (and income, of course) to recurring transactions and have even more control with your finances!

Proceed to Simple Home Budget download page.

Similar Posts:

Custom Colors for Categories

Sergiy — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 07:27:41 +0000

Simple Home Budget provides set of preselected colors for categories! These colors are in ‘soft’ area… and sometimes you need a bright color (bright red for example, to mark your ‘no-no’ expenses) for specific category. How can you select specific color? Just click on the color box that represent the current category color and a color dialog will appear! You can choose any color you like. Another reason to have more control for your expenses!

Similar Posts: