Happy Holidays! New PocketSmith Features to Fill Your Stockings

While reflecting on the changes released during 2021, we ended up striking upon a couple of new features that will make a lot of users' lives easier. Read on for details on how you can now perform math operations in key number fields in the application, and also filter through your financial events in the Calendar. But first, a quick recap.

2021: The year bank feeds changed forever

Amongst the various smaller releases during 2021, unleashing Data Connections was one of our most significant upgrades ever, second only to the “PocketSmith v2” release back in 2011.

It is the culmination of many years of learning about the complexities and fragilities of automatically updating account and transaction data in PocketSmith. Now, we’ve fully bedded in a robust and extensible data feed platform that we can continue expanding on into the future.

And the future is exciting. Open banking is finally getting traction worldwide, and public APIs for data sharing is becoming more readily available. With Data Connections, PocketSmith has the technology at the ready, no matter what the future holds for your ability to share your data. And in 2022, we will be integrating with new data partners to continue to pursue the best options available for providing you with reliable bank feeds.

On to this week! Let’s look at what we’ve just released.

Firstly: Search and filtering in the Calendar

When your Calendar is busy with many repeating bills and budgets, it’s hard to find the instance of a particular budget or bill that you’re looking for, especially those that are one-off or repeat irregularly. Until now, my family had wholly lost our 4-monthly Rates bill in the Calendar!

Filtering events in the Calendar

A full-text search box now appears on the upper right of the Calendar toolbar. Any text entered into this will expose just those events in your Calendar that match the search. You can enter anything here — the titles of the items in the Calendar, or the amounts are checked for matches.

Secondly: Perform simple math in amount fields

We sometimes need to break out a calculator when using PocketSmith, mostly to subtract amounts from one another for bills and budgets and change an amount by a specific percentage.

To ease this task, many of the amount fields in the application have received an upgrade, and you’re now able to perform calculations right within the calendar forms. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are supported using the standard operators +, -, * and /.

Math operations in the Budget form

Once you’ve entered your operation, hit Enter / Return, = or exit the form field to insert the result. Undo and redo via regular keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl + Z and Ctrl + Y on Windows; Command + Z and Command + Shift + Z on macOS) are also supported, meaning you can undo calculations until the form itself is submitted.

This feature has been enabled for many amount fields: the budget form, transaction amounts for editing and entering manual transactions, and the calendar balances list. Please let us know any other fields you’d find this useful for!

And with that, we enter the festive season. Best wishes to you and all your loved ones. 2021 has been an… interesting year for everyone; thank you for all your support. We can’t wait to share what we have in store for 2022!

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 two humans, two axolotls, two rabbits, one dog, and too many possums.