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.