Read how Charles uses PocketSmith to keep track of household spending and follow the cost of home renovations as they happen.
I’m happily married with four daughters, living in northern New South Wales, and work in the construction industry, managing the pre-construction function within a structural steel design and manufacturing company.
I guess I would be a typical head of the household, where I strive to be a role model for my family. I’m the main provider for the household financially, and although my wife does most of the categorisation within PocketSmith, I do like to keep tabs on what’s happening and often check out the reports.
We have been budgeting since 2011 and always used Excel, but we weren’t getting the detail we wanted out of it. Updating bank balances and reconciling transactions was a lot of manual work. PocketSmith had the bank feeds option online and was reasonably priced, so we decided to give it a try.
Since February 2023, so just gone three years. I wouldn’t like trying to manage my finances without PocketSmith now!
Everything finance, so budgeting and tracking expenses. We recently did renovations to our house, and PocketSmith was invaluable for keeping track of all the costs. We could very quickly get an accurate, up-to-date figure on exactly how much we had spent and where.
It hasn’t changed our approach, because we were always budgeting before PocketSmith, but it has made it a lot easier to keep track of where everything is. With bank feeds and transactions coming in automatically, it is really only cash that we have to think about and stay on top of. We still go in at least once a week and categorise all the transactions as they come through to make sure everything is up to date.
The ease of categorising expenses and income, and the way you can set up rules so that repeat transactions like wages get categorised automatically. There is a lot of stuff we don’t even have to think about. Being able to see trends across the different budget categories is a valuable insight that we didn’t have using Excel.
Stay on top of correctly categorising expenses. There is no point being half-hearted about budgeting. If you can’t put expenses into categories, there is no point trying to keep a budget, because the money just ends up in one big pool. Make sure that any cash or transfers between accounts are accounted for correctly as well.
Spending money on renovating our house. It has been very satisfying seeing everything come to life from sketches and ideas on paper to reality, and being in control of all the expenses.
