A number of you had noticed that, when viewing your receipts (pearbudget.com/receipts), when looking at past months’ data, you couldn’t always see your income receipts. Obviously problematic.
We’re pretty sure we’ve fixed that now. We’ll be keeping an eye on it, but if you see anything funny, just shoot us a note. Thanks!
Just wanted to call your attention to a post I wrote for JD Roth’s excellent personal finance blog, Get Rich Slowly. The article is all about unit pricing, and how you can use the grocery store’s price tags to compare different options and to save money when you’re shopping for food. It’s called Unit Pricing: Get More Food for Less Money. The comments that JD’s readers have made are excellent, and would be worth reading just on their own.
Get Rich Slowly is one of the premier personal finance blogs. GRS, along with Trent’s The Simple Dollar, are my two favorite blogs on personal finance. If you’re looking for good sources of writing about money and how to manage it, I can’t recommend them enough.
This isn’t so much a PearBudget feature as it is a component of all websites with forms. But I use it to make receipt entry a little quicker, and I figured I’d share it with you, in case you don’t know about it. When you’re entering your receipts, and you’ve selected the “category” dropdown box, you can jump to the category you want by typing in the first letter of the category’s name.
So let’s say I want to select “car gas” as my category. I can just hit the “c” key, and it’ll jump to the first “c” option on my dropdown list. I hit “c” again, and it goes to the second “c” on the list. If I accidentally jump past the category I want, I can keep hitting the “c” key, and it’ll skip back to the beginning of the “c’s.”
I actually use this trick whenever I have to enter my “state” in an online address form. I’m in Virginia. So I just hit the “v” key, cycle past “Vermont,” and then I’m right where I want to be.
We absolutely love getting e-mails from people who, after finding PearBudget, are excited about budgeting. Even better is actually meeting them.
We’ll be outside Philadelphia (Wayne / Main Line) during the first week of June. We haven’t completely nailed down the itinerary yet, but we’d really like to schedule in a PearBudget meet-up like the last one we had.
If you’d like to meet up, grab coffee (we’re buying), and chat about budgeting, PearBudget, or anything else, shoot us an e-mail: charlie at pearbudget dot com. We’ll post a more concrete schedule as it forms. In the meantime, let us know what works for you.
Second quick update for the day: We changed the Receipt entry form so that if you’re hand-typing the date in, and you leave the year off of it, it’ll fill that in for you. So 05/21 will automatically become 05/21/08. Like I said before, not a huge change, but it was a simple fix that a customer requested, so there you go.
I wish I had some news for those of you requesting international date tweaks, but I don’t have that for you quite yet. Soon, hopefully?
I’ll be posting a few small updates over the course of the day … nothing to hold your breath for, but there are a few small tweaks we’ve made thanks to your input, and I wanted to share them with you.
The other day, we had a comment from Gwyn Morfey, suggesting that we change the default action of the receipt entry form. If the user wants to enter today’s date for their receipt, why force them to click on the example date, or type in the date, or use the pop-up calendar to select the date? Why not simply have the “date” field submit today’s date, if the field is blank when the user submits it?
It’s a brilliant suggestion — the kind of subtle enhancement we love, the kind of improvement we wish we’d come up with ourselves. So we implemented it. Thanks, Gwyn, for the suggestion!
If you, dear reader, have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them. Thanks!
Just a quick note: Late today, we received word from our hosting company that the server will be going through some routine maintenance tomorrow morning, from 3am to 5am, Pacific Time. We’re not sure if they’ll need to use the entire window of time, or if PearBudget will just be out momentarily. We’re sorry to let you know this close to the downtime … we just found out ourselves.
We know most US users probably won’t be affected by this, but we wanted to make sure our international users weren’t in the dark, as it were.
We’ll do our best to keep you posted on planned downtime like this in the future … and hopefully we’ll be able to give you more advanced notice. Thanks for your understanding.
Recently, I was reviewing PearBudget on a friend’s computer, and was surprised at how washed-out the colors were. Although we’ve looked at the site on a number of different computers, it appears that most of the ones we’ve used to date have a higher contrast than our friend’s monitor. We realized that there are quite possibly areas of the site that (for you) are so washed out as to be illegible.
If that’s the case, and there are sections that are too hard for you to read, we’d love it if you could shoot us a note (charlie at pearbudget dot com), or comment below, with the part of the site that’s hard to read. We like how portions of the site are subtle. But we also recognize that there’s a difference between “subtle” and “invisible.” We’d love any thoughts you have about that.
So … if you’ve been using the service and thought, “you know … that’s a little too hard for me to read” … it’d be great if you could let us know. We’d like to increase the contrast on parts of the site, but we want to know where to focus our energies. (If you think of it, please include the browser you’re using, Mac/PC/Linux, and (especially) the type of monitor you’re using.)
As always, thanks a million.
More and more states and school districts are offering financial literacy courses in high schools. We think that’s fantastic. We also think that PearBudget, being a dead-simple tool for budgeting, would be helpful to these programs as they introduce students to the concepts around budgeting.
We’d like to offer free PearBudget accounts to classes of high schoolers going through a course / seminar / whathaveyou on personal finance. Trouble is: We don’t know any of these classes. So … if you happen to have a connection with any teachers / curriculum developers / others who might benefit from knowing that we’d like to partner with them to give them free accounts, we’d really appreciate it.
The fine print: Right now, this is only on the table for high school students, in a structured financial literacy program. Everyone has to be between the ages of 13 and 18. There are probably a few more conditions we just haven’t thought of, yet, but that we’ll work out on a case-by-case basis.
Thanks for any help you can give us spreading the word about this.
P.S. Thanks to Tricia at Blogging Away Debt for her recent posts on the topic of teen financial literacy. The idea of offering PearBudget to high schoolers for free has been bopping around in our heads for a while; Tricia’s post yesterday (Personal Finance Version of “Scared Straight” for Teens) is what motivated me to write this post and solicit your help. So … thanks, Tricia!
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