The PearBudget Blog | The simplest budgeting tool on the internet.

More mobile-friendly categories

We just added a small feature that I wanted to share with you. It’s subtle, but will hopefully make things easier for you if you use PearBudget on your smartphone.

On the normal PearBudget website, your categories on the “Enter a Receipt” page are listed in alphabetical order. That had been the case with the “Enter a Receipt” sections of the mobile interfaces (the iPhone / iPod Touch, Android, and general mobile phone interfaces) as well.

As of now, though, when you enter a receipt when you’re on the go, PearBudget will note that the receipt’s category is an “on the go” category. And the next time you need to enter a receipt on your smartphone, PearBudget will list your “on the go” categories at the top of the list, so you won’t have to scroll down to find them. In fact, the “most-often-used” category should be pre-filled at the very top of the list, so if you’re always entering car gas receipts, or grocery receipts, or dining out receipts, or whatever, now you only have to enter in the amount of the new receipt and hit submit (if you don’t enter a date, PearBudget assumes you mean “today”).

There are a few other refinements we’re hoping to make to the mobile interfaces soon, but if you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them. Just e-mail us at help@pearbudget.com.

Checking on Things

Hi, friends. We’ve gotten a note or two about PearBudget not working (after we worked on the servers this morning). If that’s the case for you, could you shoot me an e-mail at charlie@pearbudget.com ? Thanks so much.

Update: As far as we can tell, all issues have been fully resolved. Thanks again!

Some Planned Downtime Tomorrow (Friday, April 15th)

Hi, all! Charlie here.

I just wanted to let you know that PearBudget will be down for about an hour or two tomorrow (Friday, April 15th), from about 8am to about 10am (Eastern). We’re going to be working on the servers a bit.

We’re hoping that the downtime will actually only be about 15 minutes, but these things can sometimes go wonky, and we don’t want you to be counting on getting to the site during that window.

If updates are needed, we’ll be posting them here on the blog, and we’ll be available on Twitter as well.

Update: All done! Let us know if you have any problems, but hopefully all will be well in PearBudgetlandia.

Get a Free Lifetime Membership to Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University

We don’t post many links to contests and giveaways, as we know that your time and attention are precious. But we’re big fans of being debt free, of Simple Mom, and of Dave Ramsey, so we wanted to be sure to link to this one … over at Simple Mom, you can win one of five lifetime memberships to Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University.

In case you don’t know, Financial Peace University is a local class hosted all over the United States and Canada, talking about how to deal with debt, how to create (and stick with) budgets, and how to change your thinking and your lifestyle so you can deal with money issues in your life. People who go to it rave about it. BUT … it’s normally $109, and so a number of people balk at the price. At Simple Mom, Tsh is giving away five lifetime memberships to FPU, and the giveaway includes all sorts of goodies like an audio CD library and Dave’s book Financial Peace Revisited.

There are 3 ways to enter, and of course, we hope you win!

Tsh’s post also highlights 5 ways that keeping your home simple and clutter-free helps you manage your money.

So what are you waiting for? Go check it out! (And if you’re still reading this, keep an eye out and you’ll spot how Charlie and Sarah store their receipts.)

Linkies:
The Contest: simplemom.net/financial-peace-university/
Financial Peace University: daveramsey.com/fpu/home/

PearBudget and checkbooks

Question: I think that an awesome feature to add would be a way to use your budget entries to also balance your checkbook. I know that I can do it the way it is, but it would be great if that was an obvious, user-friendly feature on the site. I haven’t found any other tool that does both things simply and cleanly. I like the PearBudget interface, but I don’t want to do double-entry to actually balance my checkbook. Also, I like to enter bills ahead of paying them so I know what my lowest balance will be before our next pay day.

Answer: Thanks for the suggestion! Sarah’s been saying something similar lately, that there could be a smoother way to balance your checkbook using PearBudget. We’re toying with a few interface designs, but if we ever do build something like this, it’ll probably be as an “opt-in” feature (meaning, you’d need to enable it on your account), so the interface doesn’t get too crowded for people who aren’t interested in it.

Any time we add a feature, it’s a tricky balance of making it work in concert with the current interface, and not overloading the screen with too much activity. So we’ll think long and hard about how to best implement something like this before we add it in. But we really appreciate your suggestion, so Sarah and Ruth and l will toss around some ideas internally to see if we can come up with a good solution for it. As always, we can’t make promises on when/if we’d come out with anything for this, but we’ll look at our list of features to develop, and will definitely be thinking about it.

Credit card statements versus receipts

Question: I have actual receipts for March, then I have the credit card statement that I paid in March (but actual receipts are for February+March). So…the money leaves my bank account when I pay the credit card statement. Question: for March, do I enter the expenditures according to the credit card statement (mostly February transactions), or according to my ‘spending’, i.e. I buy groceries using my PC Mastercard, but don’t pay for it until April (receipt dated March)?

Answer: So, the question boils down to: “Do I enter my receipts in to PearBudget when I swipe my credit card, or when I pay the credit card bill?”

Our recommendation is that you enter the receipts as happening on the day of the transaction, not the date you pay the bill.

We can explain this in more detail, but the gist of it is that you’re entering your receipts, in large part, to notice patterns in your spending that you want to change. If you’re entering your transactions in in big blobs, it’s not going to allow you to see those patterns as easily. Also, it’s just plain simpler if you treat your swiping of your credit card as the point in time when the money leaves your account. Let us know if that doesn’t make sense, or if you have any other questions on it. Best way is to e-mail us: help@pearbudget.com.

A better, safer, faster way to be online (Firefox)

Hi, friends! Charlie here. Just wanted to make a quick announcement.

I know a number of you use a program called Internet Explorer to get onto the Internet. It has a logo that looks something like this:

Because we care about you, we wanted to let you know about another program that you can use to get onto the internet. It’s called Firefox. (There are a few other good ones, too, but right now, we’re just talking about this one.)

Why should you use Firefox if you currently use Internet Explorer? Three main reasons:

web pages you visit load faster in Firefox
your computer is more secure from phishing attacks, viruses, and other bad things when you use Firefox instead of IE
the sites you visit (including PearBudget!) look better in Firefox

All around, your experience on the Internet will be much better with Firefox.

If you currently click on the blue “e” to get onto the Internet, downloading Firefox is easy and getting started only takes a few seconds. They even let you import your bookmarks, auto-complete passwords, and other preferences from your current browser.

You can get the latest version of Firefox (Firefox 4) for FREE, by clicking here. It’s really super-easy, and you’ll be happy you did it. We promise. Go check it out.

Win 6 months of free budgeting with PearBudget!

If you’d like to enter to win 6 months of free budgeting with PearBudget, go check out this great post at Living Peacefully Less Stressed. Courtney has a contest with 3 ways to win, going on until 3/28. Good luck!

Coffee and Donuts, On Us

In a little over a week and a half, I (Charlie) will be down in Austin, Texas, to lead a session at the SXSW Interactive conference (my session is on “how do you run a web business and still be a good dad? Alternately, how do you be a good dad and still run a web business?”). It should be a lot of fun.

While I’m there, I’d love to meet up with some of you to have coffee and donuts, or try on cowboy boots, or do whatever you do for fun down there. (We’ll plan on coffee and donuts for now.) I’m arriving on March 10th, and am heading out on the 16th. (I’m aware that that undermines the whole “being a good dad” part of my session.)

So: If you’re in Austin and want to meet up, send me a note (charlie@pearbudget.com), and let me know! We can then work out good times/places. And if you know any combo cowboy-boot-donut-shops, so much the better!

Downtime

Question: seems to be a problem accessing Pear Budget today…is it just me or is anyone else having problems?

Answer: Sorry for the downtime. We’re working on getting everything resolved ASAP. Our hosting company has been having an issue (http://status.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/1867-gs-grid-service-cluster04-instability/). We’re trying to move to a new host as soon as possible, but that’s a bit tricky, with the large database and other files we have to transfer. Working on it as quickly as we can.

PearBudget beautiful, simple budgeting. (This is our blog.)