Description:

Finance

2867 KB

Budgeteer

Business

Alegre Software

1.1 BUDGETEER

Budgeteer is a fusion between a calendar and a spreadsheet, allowing you to keep track of your finances in an entirely new way. The benefit of this format is that it allows you to keep a running total of your disposable income on a day-to-day basis, so at a glance you can see if things are going to get tight down the road, allowing you to adjust your spending accordingly well ahead of time. Conversely, you can see exactly when you will be able to make that large expenditure without putting your finances in peril further down the road. Most people budget from paycheck to paycheck, which is not a long term tracking solution, or try set up their own spreadsheet solution, which is often cumbersome and hard to maintain. Budgeteer automatically extends its internal database as time passes and fills in recurring entries so that you always have the ability to examine your finances one year into the future. Budgeteer is easy to use. Simply enter all your income and expenses in the appropriate dates and Budgeteer will automatically keep a running total of your balance, and will even show the daily balance in red if it drops below a threshold of your choosing. You can enter one-off events such as special purchases or payments as well as events that have daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly recurrences. Budgeteer will even skip weekends and holidays if desired and enter the event on the next banking day when projecting recurring events into the future, similar to what a bank would do when debiting your account. Budgeteer is a great money management tool because of the encouragement and motivation it gives people when they see what they COULD have in savings months from now if they keep their spending under control. Because it can potentially be quite time consuming to keep Budgeteer up to date with every transaction you make, you can reset the program any time to start afresh. Keep in mind that Budgeteer is not meant to keep track of your account to the penny, but a tool to give you an overview of your day-to-day cash flow and disposable income. When you first open Budgeteer you will see that there is already fictitious data entered, to illustrate what a filled in calendar might look like. If you scroll the calendar forward in time (down arrow to the left) you will see how the running totals vary up and down, and in a few place are negative! This is an early warning that something must be done to put your finances on an even keel before that day arrives. After you have explored the sample data a bit, simply select the "Erase All Data" menu item to delete all the sample data, making Budgeteer ready for use. I hope you find Budgeteer useful and look forward to any comments and suggestions you may have.