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I brought up PocketSmith in the zaurg 2020 thread and a few other people have jumped on board! So here is a dedicated thread for PocketSmith chat. The following OP structure has been shamelessly copied from the YNAB thread because that is a good thread OP. What is PocketSmith? PocketSmith is the kind of personal finance software you get if you crossbreed a calendar, a typical personal expense tracking software, proper accounting software and a crazy spreadsheet with a fancy forecasting model. Why should I use PocketSmith instead of YNAB/Mint/other software/my own personal spreadsheets? Manage your budget in a calendar like a human, not in an abstract spreadsheet If you understand the concept of scheduling events on a calendar, then you'll find it easy to schedule recurring transactions on a calendar to create a budget in PocketSmith. So when you think "I get paid twice a month on Tuesdays", that's what you set up starting from a specific date, rather than a vague "fortnightly" income the way most other budgeting software works. If you understand how to use email filters, you'll find it easy to automate the categorization of expenses in PocketSmith - so you don't have to keep correcting badly AI-categorized transactions like some other software. If you like super fancy graphs that aren't just a pie chart that are actually useful and that automatically get generated without you spending hours in Excel, you'll like it. All of the standard personal finance type reports you'd expect are there, plus a lot of other reports that you don't typically get unless you use real accounting software. Make past you accountable to future you by looking at your cash flow forecasts If you find it hard to make sense of lots of numbers, PocketSmith will visually show current you how past you is affecting future you by projecting your bank and loan balances 6 months to 30 years into the future based on your past spending. It also converts budgeted numbers to different timeframes seamlessly:
You don't need to use one software for creating and managing a budget, and another for tracking expenses. Everything is in one place. Live bank feeds (on premium and super plans) are supported globally. A lot of other software doesn't play nice with non-US bank integrations. Still not sure if PocketSmith is for you? Create a free account and go in to play around with a demo. Or contact the PocketSmith team - they are pretty generous with offering free trials. I got a 30 day free trial of premium when I emailed in a question. How much is this going to cost me? Plans start from free and go up to $21.95/month:
Yes it's more expensive than other apps. In my view, it is absolutely worth it because it totally automates managing finances to a level that just blows all the other apps out of the water. It also has a really good mobile app that lets you check how much you've spent in your budget. With live bank feeds, figuring out whether you've got enough left in your budget to pay for your cartful of groceries happens real time and seamlessly. How do I get started? PocketSmith has a really good onboarding wizard to walk you through the process. That said:
Now Pocket Smith will automatically show how you're doing against budget whenever you run a report. It doesn't matter if you run a weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly report - Pocket Smith will convert your budgeted amounts using your budget calendar. All you have to do is stick to your budget! How do I create a budget manually? By systematically going through every category you have set up!
 Help! Why is PocketSmith doing a weird thing? Comrade Gritty posted:I grabbed Pocketsmith to try it out, and it feels insane, but I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or not. I added an account for a loan I have, which gave me an account with a negative balance, as well as my checking account with a positive balance. It then detected the payment transaction as an expense in the checking account and another transaction as an income in the loan account. Which makes sense, but it then totally makes everything else confusing by counting that as income, so it shows up in the income statement as more income rather than as paying down an existing debt. You need to mark these transactions as transfers between accounts: https://learn.pocketsmith.com/article/367-transfer-marking-in-pocketsmith Basically when you have both an asset (checking) and a liability (loan) in Pocket Smith, it will apply double entry book keeping like a proper accounting software. In strict accounting terms, a loan payment is not an expense, it is a reduction of a liability. The true expense component of the loan is the interest. You can set up transfer categories to budget the loan repayments as a way of monitoring cash flow. https://learn.pocketsmith.com/article/132-dealing-with-transfers-in-pocketsmith Comrade Gritty posted:The rules engine for categorization also seems hopelessly naive. My car loan logs interest as something with the payee "Interest", but my savings account also uses the same payee, so I can't see to add an automatic categorization that would actually filter these to different categories because the payee is exactly the same (but entirely different accounts). You need to create an actual filter, then you should be able to set rules with multiple parameters: https://learn.pocketsmith.com/article/507-everything-you-need-to-know-about-filters Comrade Gritty posted:It's also apparently imported 600+ transactions going back... a year in some accounts, less in other accounts and it really wants me to go through and categorize all of them. More so than other budgeting software, it really puts this in your face and it's actually a good practice. It uses what you've categorized as the basis for trends analysis and a few of the other features like forecasting. If it bothers you a lot, pick a cut off date beyond which you won't categorize stuff and delete the transactions from Pocket Smith. Or do what I do, which is just chip away at 10 or so old transactions at a time. When you have your categorization rules and auto filters set up, you spend like zero effort categorizing news transactions so eventually you'll get them all. This looks complicated, I don't know if I should Comrade Gritty posted:Am I missing something? Is this how this software is supposed to work? It looks like there's a cool idea under the surface here, but right now I feel like I'm way too dumb to operate this software and I should just save the $15/month. Don't feel dumb! The key is to persist and ask questions. PocketSmith also has really good documentation and a very intuitive user interface, so it's easy to pick up very quickly. Once you get set up, monitoring your finances should be pretty much a case of auto pilot!
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Feb 3, 2020 09:27
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I think I’m going to have to nuke everything and start over, but to make sure I’m on the right track: Has anyone “grouped” accounts together? I was trying to get under the 10 account limit and combined some accounts. Take for instance “car payment”, I have two car loans at two different banks. Can I lump those together so that I budget the amount into one total, with 1 total liability? Now that Ally has buckets condensing checking and savings should be a lot cleaner so I’ll complete that before jumping back in.
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Feb 3, 2020 20:58
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Grouping accounts together will actually treat all transactions like it comes from the same account, so it comes down to personal preference. I like to be able to reconcile my accounts to my statements, so I don't group any active accounts. But I wouldn't mind grouping old accounts for archival purposes, like if I had a checking account with Bank A, then changed to Bank B a few years later and now currently have a checking account with Bank C, I'd be happy to group checking amounts A and B together, or if I had a clean changeover from B to C, I'd happily group them all together as just checking. In the situation you described, it would probably work fine since you're talking about car loans which have defined payment schedules so not really too big a deal.
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Feb 4, 2020 04:00
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Still working on trying to figure this software out! I ended up just reseting my account and now I'm slowly adding accounts to try and get a handle on a smaller scale first, before adding all of my accounts. One thing I'm not sure about handling is my auto loan. My bank reports the daily balance (which includes any accrued interest), which appears to match (at least today, I just added it) what PocketSmith has for the balance of the loan. Between my checking account and the loan account each month I have 3 transactions, - A negative transaction in my checking account which represents the full payment to the loan each month. - A positive transaction in my loan account which represents the portion of the payment that went to the principal. - A position transaction in my loan account which represents the portion of the payment that went to the interest. This account does not add a negative transaction that represents the interest, the total balance on the account (which actually represents the payoff amount if I were to pay it today) just behind the scene goes up. I'm not sure how to handle this, it seems like the way PocketSmith wants this to work is a single transaction in each account that represents the full payment, which gets marked as a transfer, and then a second transaction which indicates the interest being accrued each, month? I think if I mark the full payment in the checking account and the prinicipal portion as a transfer, and the interest portion as an expense, it'll show up incorrectly because the interest is showing up as a positive transaction, not a negative one and thus won't be an expense?
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Feb 16, 2020 02:28
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Comrade Gritty posted:I'm not sure how to handle this, it seems like the way PocketSmith wants this to work is a single transaction in each account that represents the full payment, which gets marked as a transfer, and then a second transaction which indicates the interest being accrued each, month? That's right, that's normally how it works on most loan accounts. You'll have this information on a loan amortization schedule. It's interesting that your lender reports the transactions that way - it's not inaccurate, just not completely transparent. You could force PocketSmith to categorize all three transactions as transfers, but this doesn't solve the issue of the actual interest expense not getting recorded. Comrade Gritty posted:This account does not add a negative transaction that represents the interest, the total balance on the account (which actually represents the payoff amount if I were to pay it today) just behind the scene goes up.  This would drive me mental and it's confusing as hell. How does it report transactions on your monthly statements? Like the formal end of month statements, not just what it says if you login online to view transactions. Do you see a daily accrued interest charge increasing your auto loan balance?
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Feb 16, 2020 20:28
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Leng posted:
I’m not actually sure. It appears I don’t get monthly statements in my online account for that loan for some reason. I do for all my other accounts at USAA but apparently not that one. I just shred all of the statement mail I get from USAA because I had thought it was all online anyways. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the paperwork that’s coming now.
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Feb 16, 2020 21:33
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Perhaps there's some sort of legal requirement about the statements having to be physically mailed? I know in Australia (or the state of NSW at least) this was the case for mortgages - until quite recently, you couldn't opt out of receiving a physical statement for a mortgage. The other place you could look is at the terms and conditions of your original loan agreement, which would specify when interest is posted to your account (it could accrue daily but so be posted monthly). All that said, my work around would be to post one entry at the end of the month for the interest. Sometimes I'm lazy and will post a few months of interest expense in one go. Less hassle that way, and it's not the sort of thing I need real time info for.
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Feb 17, 2020 03:28
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How do I make the Loans category show up in the budget figures? I mean it's not like I can withdraw a piece of my truck, so I'd like to have that reflected in the budget page. If you have a $350/mo car payment and make $700 you shouldn't be able to budget $700 in expenses after making a car payment that doesn't make sense.
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Jul 5, 2020 18:56
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Knyteguy posted:How do I make the Loans category show up in the budget figures? I mean it's not like I can withdraw a piece of my truck, so I'd like to have that reflected in the budget page. If you have a $350/mo car payment and make $700 you shouldn't be able to budget $700 in expenses after making a car payment that doesn't make sense. So there are two different ways of looking at this in Pocket Smith: the Budget page (which does what you want, assuming you've set up each budget correctly) and the Income & Expense page (which is a personal profit or loss statement - this won't show loan repayments since that's a transfer of an amount from an asset to repay a liability). Kind of hard to troubleshoot without a screen shot here, so what does your Budget page look like? It's the first menu item under "Budgets & Reports". Have you set up your loan repayments on the truck as transfer budgets? https://learn.pocketsmith.com/article/203-creating-a-transfer-budget
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Jul 6, 2020 13:16
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Ahhh they don't take USAA darnit.
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Oct 13, 2021 00:52
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I'm just getting set up with this to try it out for managing our household. Some of my accounts after auto-import go back substantially further than others. Notably, the CC we use for basically everything doesn't go back very far at all. I'm thinking about just deleting everything older than the oldest CC import item? It seems noisy and chaotic back there anyways. Also it's auto-categorizing a ton of stuff as transfers that definitely aren't (e.g. everything involving Zelle, checks, direct deposits). Seems straightforward to fix, but also, seems like an odd default? Why is there no "income" category by default? edit oh thats "payment" isnt it Bloody fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jul 10, 2022 |
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Jul 10, 2022 18:57
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Bloody posted:Some of my accounts after auto-import go back substantially further than others. Notably, the CC we use for basically everything doesn't go back very far at all. I'm thinking about just deleting everything older than the oldest CC import item? It seems noisy and chaotic back there anyways. Bloody posted:Also it's auto-categorizing a ton of stuff as transfers that definitely aren't (e.g. everything involving Zelle, checks, direct deposits). Seems straightforward to fix, but also, seems like an odd default? Why is there no "income" category by default? So when you set up your categories, you need to set a category type in "Category details", and it'll give you a choice of transactions that are both income and expense, income only, or expense only. In "Category options", you can also set it as a transfer category too, so that anything you categorize to it is automatically marked as a transfer and excluded from reports. I use transfer categories for mortgage and credit card repayments, so when the auto-pay direct debit goes out from my transaction account and the incoming payment comes through in my credit card, I categorize both of those transactions to the "Credit card payments" transfer category. Because the description is usually consistent, I have it set up to auto-categorize it and it usually does a pretty good job. For salary and other income that comes in via direct deposit, if there's a good unique description, I have category rules set up to auto-categorize them to a category that is set up as an income category. I hope that makes sense!
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Jul 11, 2022 00:27
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