BudgetPulse: Simple Online Money Tracking and Budgeting

No one could say that the world is short of financial planning and budget apps and some are more welcoming than others. Budgetpulse falls into the welcoming category because not only are the features clear and user friendly, the website has a whole host of helpful information and explanations available to read before you even sign in.

The purpose, like most others, is to help you see where your money is going, help you budget better for the future and also to help you set and achieve financial goals big or small. It can also tell you your current net worth, which might be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you’re doing against budget!

Set up is easy and starts with the profile page where you can enter your details wherever you are in the world and in whatever currency you use. Once this is done you can move on and set up your accounts.

Budgetpulse doesn’t sync with your bank accounts or take sensitive personal information from you so identity theft is not an issue and there are two ways to input data. From the tools section you can upload bank statements from your existing Quicken or Microsoft money file or from a CSV Excel file with a format supplied by budgetpulse. If none of these methods suit then it’s easy to manually create accounts.

When adding transactions to your various accounts you can categorize them, split them and add notes to them to help understand them when looking back. You can also mark recurring transactions like loan repayments so that they automatically repeat month by month and transfer money between accounts.

The budget page is easy on the eye and simple to use. Set a budget for each category and a bar chart will appear showing the budget levels. If you set a savings goal as well you can collect money from others using PayPal and Amazon.

Making sense of all of the information loaded and updated is aided by clear and concise bar graphs and pie charts showing you just where your money is going. And if it’s going where your budget says it should then all the better!

Conclusion
With all of the financial planning and budgeting apps around it’s hard to categorize them without looking at all of them on an equal footing. Having said that, budgetpulse provides all you need to know in an easy to use format with clear reports. I particularly like the savings goal feature. If you can persuade other people to donate to your dream , how nice then to be able to point them in the direction of the correct PayPal or Amazon details.