Read how Alica keeps on top of a financial life that has grown more complex over nearly 10 years with PocketSmith.
I’m part of a DINK (Double Income No Kids) couple based in Geneva, Switzerland. I moved here nine years ago from Australia. I love the mountains. I am living the dream between ski slopes in winter and stand-up paddleboarding and hiking trails in summer. I recently made a career leap from the UN to becoming a travel advisor, because if you’re going to spend your life organising other people’s travel, you may as well make it official! I also have a serious knitting habit, which is basically the opposite of my outdoor life but keeps me sane.
Chief Financial Officer, always have been! I keep track of everything — my husband is very happy to leave that to me.
I came over from Quicken in 2016 and wanted something that could pull data directly from my bank. Being based in Australia at the time, the New Zealand connection made a huge difference as overseas providers just couldn’t do what I needed. I also loved that I could enter cash transactions directly in the iOS app, which was a must-have for me.
Coming up on 10 years! Long enough to have very strong opinions.
It started when my husband and I moved to joint accounts and took on a mortgage. I needed a proper way to track expenses, and the Budgets feature made that easy. Now life is more complicated: multiple accounts, multiple currencies, life across different countries. Having everything in one place with a single base currency view is what makes it all make sense.
It’s given me genuine visibility. When my career changed recently, I could sit down, look at our budget clearly, and actually make decisions. That kind of clarity is hard to put a price on.
Quick Import and the Quick Categorise tool. Between those two, importing and sorting transactions from my Swiss bank accounts is genuinely fast. PocketSmith remembers your CSV mapping, so I just download from my bank and upload directly into PocketSmith and then categorise everything. Now I’m trying the Categorise By Merchant beta feature, and categorisation is happening even faster!
But honestly, what’s kept me around for 10 years is the team. I’ve never encountered a company in any industry that is so responsive and genuinely willing to improve. I manage multiple currencies now, and whenever a new feature drops that doesn’t quite show which currency a transaction is in, I send feedback. Every single time, they respond warmly, log it with the developers, and actually do something about it. That culture of listening is rare, and it’s admirable.
Don’t be afraid to reach out to the support team. One time, I accidentally deleted a bunch of transactions during a bad data upload. I was dreading having to reconstruct everything manually, but the team rolled my data back to a previous day, just like that. Crisis averted.
Changing careers forced us to take a proper look at our spending. It was honestly overdue. We cut a bunch of subscriptions, I stopped defaulting to eating lunch out, and we’re now seriously considering selling the car. Sometimes a shake-up is the best thing that can happen to your budget.
