Calendar to account balance sync, new Dashboard, public roadmap

Calendar to account balance sync, new Dashboard, public roadmap
Blog post · 27 Nov, 2012

Welcome to our first Product Blog post in 2 months! Though we’ve deployed a very large number of tweaks and fixes in the past 2 months, however there are a couple which warrant special mention - a new main Dashboard, and the release of calendar to account balance sync - an oft-request feature which has been in the works for months.

We’re also taking steps towards being more responsive - firstly with a public roadmap for the next 6 months on the wiki, and secondly by committing to be more active within our Uservoice Forum. Though being a small team means workloads are high and schedules are frantic, we’re aware that we need to be better at communicating with our users on a wider scale - and we’re trying to fix this. But remember - if you ever want to reach out at any time, we’re always available via email.

Contents

• 1 Calendar to Account Balance Sync
• 2 New Dashboard
• 3 Public Roadmap and Feedback Forum
• 4 Thanks for your support!

Calendar to Account Balance Sync

Up until now, calendar and accounts are not linked to one another at all. While this means that PocketSmith is very flexible in how you represent your finances, it did mean that keeping an accurate starting point for your Forecast was challenging. As your Forecast and Actual balances diverged, manual resetting of forecast balances was required. This was laborious, inaccurate and prone to mistakes.

We’ve taken a while to think out and develop this feature, so we’re confident that it will hit the mark. These are the core features:

• Controls to link a calendar to one or more accounts to sync balances
• A difference event in the calendar which shows how far ahead or behind forecast you are
• This event can be clicked to show more information and reset your forecast balance.

This is the first step towards and more unified PocketSmith with respect to calendars and accounts. We’re really love to hear what you think, so please get in touch.

New Dashboard

The design for the new Dashboard had been knocking around for some time - in stasis because we felt that the information density was perhaps a bit too high, and other areas needed some tweaks for clarity.

However it was decided that it was crunch time - the old Dashboard was looking more dated with the rest of the PocketSmith UI receiving upgrades and redesigns. It didn’t provide enough useful information, it didn’t give a birds-eye view of your finances, and it was cumbersome - the alerts in particular.

Now however, more information about your finances is available immediately from the Dashboard. Alerts are top-center, budgeting information is immediately available, and the summary pie chart date periods can be changed.

We’re taking on board feedback for this iteration of the Dashboard, and the first area that we’ll be tweaking will be to allow each section to be re-ordered and collapsed, meaning you can set up the different panes in the Dashboard for how you’d like to view your account. If you have any feedback on the Dashboard, please get in touch with us.

Public Roadmap and Feedback Forum

We’re attempting to be more transparent in our development roadmap for the application. We’ve taken two actions to make this a reality:

1. A public roadmap is now available at the wiki page Roadmap. This will be updated on an ongoing basis.
2. We’re going to be more active on our Uservoice Feedback Forum, responding to ideas and suggestions more effectively.

We’ve fallen far behind with our Uservoice Forum, and so we’re committing to being more responsive here. We’ve begun this process by starting consolidating the two previously separate PocketSmith v1 and v2 forums. Now we’re working through each idea, consolidating where required, closing off ideas which have been implemented recently, and responding to all ideas under consideration. With a sizable backlog, this may take a couple of weeks, but we’re determined to get things into a much more useful state.

We look forward to being able to be more responsive to your ideas and suggestions as we get a better handle on our Uservoice Forum over the coming weeks. And we’d really love you hear any feedback you had on the Roadmap - please let us know if you think that something is missing!

Thanks for your support!

We’d just like to quickly thank all of our users for supporting PocketSmith - it is having people like you on board that allows us to continue improving PocketSmith. We appreciate your patience while we grow to become more responsive and deliver on the features you’d like to see. And as always, we love hearing your stories so please get in touch :)