At PocketSmith we focus on providing flexibility for your money journey. Flexibility means we don’t shy away from hard problems, and won’t water the product and it’s capabilities down.
Under this backdrop and based on years of experience and user feedback, we’ve rebuilt the budget analysis engine. The basics haven’t changed, and you should see the same numbers that you did before this change, for the most part. The main exception to this is how rollover is presented, which is much clearer now.
While most of the changes are under the hood, a raft of user interface and experience improvements have been released alongside this — all of which we discuss in this blog post. But before we get into the changes you’ll see, it’s worthwhile to discuss some background on budget analysis.
On paper, budget analysis is a simple task: take what you intended to spend over a time period for a category, and compare it with what you actually spent.
But we believe that money isn’t simple, and rigidity in financial planning means that you’re changing behaviour to fit the software — not changing the software to fit you. Other budgeting software often puts you on rails: a monthly budget, with a monthly review period, and a monthly check-in. We push back against this dogmatic approach.
Firstly, in PocketSmith you can schedule your budgets to occur however often as you’d like: daily, weekly, monthly, annually and any multiple of those within. If you get paid weekly, it rarely makes sense to use a monthly budget for your Groceries.
Secondly, PocketSmith enables you to analyse your budget over any time frame — aggregating all of your budgets into any time period. So although you might budget for your Groceries spend weekly, you can aggregate these into a quarterly analysis to see how you’re tracking for this quarter.
Third, the other key budgeting features that round out the PocketSmith experience. Rolling up subcategories into their parents to see how you’re doing in aggregate over any timeframe — for example, analyse your Household parent category in aggregate by rolling up your Groceries, Home Maintenance and Gardening budgets into it. Then we have rollover, refunds, one-off budget exceptions, multiple currencies, safe balance calculations, interest — it’s a lot to bring together to present a coherent analysis experience.
And while the general concept of rollover budgets have been well-established in other PFM software, our spin on it is uniquely useful. Rollover deficits or surpluses are carried forward in perpetuity, ready to be repaid or consumed when you see fit. It’s not realistic for many people to start every month with a blank-slate budget. Financial planning and management shouldn’t be built around the arbitrary period of months: if you’re grinding to get out of the red you may want to dig in weekly, but if things are going well then a quarterly check-in might be all you need.
Given that our existing budget analysis already supported the previously discussed features reasonably well, why did we make the choice to rebuild budget analysis?
In one word: rollover. We’d received years of feedback about how PocketSmith did rollover, since its beta launch in 2020 — especially from folks who came to us from other PFM applications. The way that rollover was presented within your budgets was never quite right, and we wanted to fix that. Common use cases necessitated checkboxes and toggles where they shouldn’t really be necessary, and edge use cases resulted in quirks in a few places.
We also didn’t want to water down the overall flexibility of rollover in PocketSmith. Other applications don’t allow you to carry forward a budget deficit due to overspending, for example. To us, this is an vitally important feature of rollover — being able to still hit your long-term goals by sticking to your budget in aggregate, instead of needing to fund all of your overspending at the start of every month.
Additionally, we also envisage further improvements to how budgeting and forecasting is managed in PocketSmith. This rebuild puts us in good stead to see those plans come to fruition.
If you use rollover, you’ll see a significant number of changes when analysing your rollover categories. The Budgets and Trends pages in particular represent rollover very well now, and rolling up categories that have rollover is now possible.
If you’ve previously tried rollover and decided it wasn’t for you — we’d recommend giving it another shot, as the changes made vastly improves how we represent rollover surpluses in PocketSmith and introduces a consistent approach across the board.
Outside of the way that rollover analysed is presented, you’ll see many user interface improvements for budget analysis. A new visualisation, the budget burndown chart, is being released. Also, categories that only have one-off budgets within them are now treated like repeating budgets for budget analysis — perfect for unexpected or irregular spending.
Read on for the nitty-gritty for all these changes!
There are a couple of changes which affect all places that you view a budget analysis: the new budget analysis panel, and the budget burndown chart. We’d like to introduce these briefly prior to working through the individual page changes — as you’ll see these two new features everywhere.
Up until now, there have been a few different styles of budget analysis popups that have been used. Though these always contained nearly exactly the same information as one another, they were not unified in presentation or layout, and the language used between the different versions was sometimes different.
These have been unified into a single budget analysis panel now, which always looks and reads the same, while still containing the same data. These are available throughout the application wherever we perform budget analysis: the Calendar, Budget page, Trends page and the Income & Expense Report.
The new budget analysis panel, as shown on the Calendar and Budget pages.
The information within these has been improved, with clearer headings and consistent sections for Budget, Actual and Rollover. This means that reading the numbers from top-to-bottom is more cohesive now than what it was previously.
Old concepts have been renamed to clarify the impact of rollover and other budget adjustments. The biggest of these is the introduction of “Effective budget” — this is your original budget, but with rollover and refunds taken into account. It is this budgeted number which is then measured against for your actual spending.
Rollover numbers that are included in the panel are also now clearer, with reduction from overspending and surplus used being the two numbers which result in your effective budget, along with surplus carried over, deficit carried over and a final rollover balance.
More numbers are now clickable within the budget analysis panel — particularly rollover numbers — with relevant popups showing how the given number came about. You can click the number for “reduction from overspending” for a single category’s analysis or for a rolled up analysis, and get a breakdown of exactly what categories were overspent within, leading to the reduction that you’re seeing. This makes it far easier to find category overspending hotspots, allowing you to course correct.
At the bottom of the budget analysis panel, there is a new button to show burndown, which will open up a brand new visualisation, which is only possible because of these new methods of budget analysis. This chart will be familiar to anyone who has used burndown charts for project management in the past.
The budget burndown chart shows the total amount of money that you have budgeted over a given period across one or more categories. It then plots your spending in those categories against a straight-line, starting from the total amount budgeted at the start of the period, down to $0 at the end of the period.
Budget burndown chart, for a rolled-up category. Displays your actual spending versus ideal straight-line spending over the analysis period.
Using this chart, you can track how closely you’re sticking to your budget, over any budget analysis period. It highlights any points that you’re drifting significantly below the ideal trend line for inconsistent spending. This let’s you quickly pinpoint the time that you started slipping in terms of overspending easily.
Up until now, if you had only one-off budgets within a category, you wouldn’t be able to get a full analysis of how you tracked against those one-off budgets over a period.
This has now changed — if you only have one-off budgets in a category, then those one-off budgets are linked together in analysis as though it were a repeating budget. This is perfect for completely irregular spending, such as a rare date night with your partner. You can pop a budgeted amount into the calendar, and your analysis will align correctly.
Budget-period analysis for a one-off budget, which is scheduled sporadically over time.
Importantly, this also means that one-off budgets of this kind can now be included in safe balance calculations as well, meaning fewer restrictions when making use of that feature.
The rubber hits the road on the main Budget page, where there are a great number of user interface improvements that make using the page more enjoyable. It’s easier to get between key pieces of information about your budgets, and consistency between the way we present granular analysis has been drastically improved.
Also, the budget page did not do a good job of including rollover into budget analysis up until now. Analysis was not granular enough for us to have the numbers maintain accuracy over any analysis period, and we hadn’t fully formulated our position on when rollover data should and shouldn’t be included in the analysis.
The analysis changes are primarily in service of rollover here. During the early stages of the beta, the effect of a rollover surplus and deficit on your total budgeted amount was too blunt. We’d always include both, leading to a total budgeted amount that doesn’t reflect reality — just because you have a rollover surplus in a particular category, doesn’t mean you intend to spend it all during the current budget period.
This shortcoming led to the inclusion of a checkbox on the page, to include or exclude rollover in the total budget summary. While this solved the immediate issue, the checkbox was a stopgap to cover over the deficiency in the way that budget analysis was performed.
This checkbox has now been removed because we’ve carefully reworked the effect that rollover has on your total budget, differentiating rollover surpluses affects your “total budgeted” amount from how a rollover deficit does.
A rollover deficit will always reduce your total budgeted amount, by up to the maximum of the budgeted amount for a category in a period. So if you have a $100 Groceries budget, but are carrying over a $250 rollover deficit, then your total budgeted amount will be reduced by $100.
A rollover surplus will now only change your total budgeted amount if you’ve consumed some of your surplus during a given period. So if you have an $80 Eating Out budget, which also has a $200 rollover surplus, and you spend $180 — then you’ve consumed $100 of your rollover surplus. This will increase your total budgeted amount by $100, as this is money you had available to spend, but you’ve only just committed to spending it through extra money being spent on Eating Out.
Total Budget Summary now shows the budget analysis panel when clicked, and is consistently includes rollover information when necessary.
This means that your total budget more closely reflects the numbers you need to keep an eye on to hit your future financial goals: reducing your total budget if you have a deficit, and only increasing your budget if you consume some budget surplus. Otherwise, budget surplus is not included in the analysis.
The user interface of the main Budget page has changed fairly significantly, firstly with a better presentation of crucial elements across the page, with better font choices and heirarchy of information.
Per-row budget analysis now includes rollover, whereas rollover was never included previously in the rows due to limitations of the analysis methods used. This means that the data within the rows more closely aligns with the total budget summary that appears at the top of the page.
This also means that roll-up budgets now take into account rollover as well, meaning that the bars that you see for your current budgets on the main Budget page will match those displayed on the Trends page.
The budget analysis detail panel that is available on other pages is also available when clicking on any rows on the Budget page now, including both individual category analyses, and the total budget summary at the top of the page.
Original budget page, without rollover being represented within each row.
New budget page, with rollover shown in each row when relevant, and a better heirarchy of information.
The Trends page has benefited from the same budget analysis changes as the Budget page, but with more depth on a per-category level. This means you’ll see a more consistent through-line can be drawn between the Budget page, the Trends page, and the Income & Expense Report.
The chart interface itself has received a raft of improvements. When you end up with a negative budget in a category due to overspending or large refunds, the chart can now display negative numbers. In the past, we used to clamp the low point of the graph to $0 — but now, it’s easier to visualise the impact of overspending more easily.
Just like the Budget page, rollover now works when analysis is rolled up — either into a parent category, or when viewing all categories from the main Trends page. Being able to sum up all rollover surplus and deficit across any number of categories greatly enhances the way that this feature can be used.
Viewing the detailed budget analysis of each bar has significantly changed, making it far easier to dig into the numbers that relate to an individual bar. Now instead of a popup appearing when you hover over each bar, the new Budget Analysis Panel always appears on the right, and clicking on a given bar will lock the panel in place on the right, so that it’s easier to view and inspect those numbers without having to hold your mouse in one place.
The error messages that used to take up a lot of space have been improved and are now more subtle, as these are informational warnings that don’t need to be as highlighted as they were.
The old trends page, with large warnings, a wandering rollover line, and the low point being clamped to $0.
New trends page, with subtle warnings, a subtle rollover indicator in the background, and displaying full negative values.
A big change to the Trends charts is that rollover trend information is now presented directly on each chart, as a purple area chart that appears behind the main trends chart. This tracks the movement of your rollover surplus or deficit over time, on a daily basis. As you spend money each day, the amount of rollover surplus or deficit in the selected categories is calculated and represented by this area.
In its default mode, the area chart is smoothed out and placed behind the trends bars. However you can also turn on highlight rollover using the toggle in the sidebar. This brings the rollover data in front of the trends bars, makes the colours much darker and features daily granularity for the data that it’s showing.
You can then pinpoint exactly when over an analysis period that your rollover surplus or deficit changed significantly. Once identified, you can click the chart to lock the budget analysis panel on the right, so you can see the exact transactions that caused the change in your rollover amount.
If you roll up your budgets to view a combined Trends chart for a parent category or view the main trends page, and have a rollover surplus in some categories but a deficit in others, you’ll see two distinct rollover area charts — one above the line and one below the line.
Like much of rollover, this visualisation works best for budgets that have irregular spending (like Groceries), and not as well for categories that have regular spending patterns, such as bill categories.
Rolled up Food category budget analysis, showing the smooth rollover area chart in the background.
Rolled up Food category budget analysis, with 'highlight rollover' activated. There is an area chart for rollover surplus, as well as deficit.
The changes above have also been integrated into the Income & Expense Report, making the numbers shown within this report consistent with those shown elsewhere in PocketSmith. Rollover is applied to this report exactly the same as it is on the main Budget page.
Rollover now has its own dedicated column in the Income and Expense Report, which shows either the reduction from overspending on your budget for the period, or the rollover surplus used for that budget. Using the difference includes rollover toggle in the sidebar, you’re able to change whether or this rollover column is used in calculating the difference between your budgeted and actual spending for the period.
Each row has an icon on the right to show the budget analysis panel, giving you the same breakdown that you see elsewhere and the ability to open the budget burndown chart as well.
Income & Expense Report with the old budget analysis, without rollover column.
New Income & Expense Report, with a rollover column and access to the budget analysis panel.
This brings to a close a massive project and upgrade. It gets our rollover budgeting feature far closer exiting beta phase — as we mentioned earlier, if you’ve tried it before and turned it off, please give it another look.
And with that: may your budget analysis prove to be both insightful and fruitful!
James is the CTO and co-founder at PocketSmith. He loves tech from software to hardware to music, and is passionate about technology being a net-positive in people’s lives. He lives off-grid with three humans, one axolotl, one dog, and too many possums.
