A new Backup and Restore feature has been released, which allows you to back up all your transaction information into CSV. This extends the previous CSV downloads that were available, to now include bank and account number information.
This CSV can then be used to restore your categorised transaction history, account names, labels, notes and balances – either to your existing user account or a completely different one if needed.
The new transaction search interface has now been released into beta, following a solid test period internally and from a number of early access users.
Everyone can now turn the new search on from the Beta Settings area. We’ll continue to improve this feature as feedback continues to arrive, as we work towards this new interface replacing the legacy search.
A new mobile-specific template has been released for the web application Dashboard, to allow you to quickly put together a single column Dashboard designed for viewing in your phone’s mobile web browser, as described previously.
You can find this template when clicking “Add new dashboard” on the web application. Then when you load the Dashboard on mobile, if you’ve not previously selected a dashboard on your device, the first one with “mobile” in the dashboard name will be chosen automatically.
A new version of the iOS has been released, with the following changes. Grab it now from the App Store!
PocketSmith’s support for the QIF file format has been extended, with long-awaited features, including:
As one of the most commonly used file formats for transactions, we hope that this makes things easier to get your transactions in PocketSmith if you manually import your files.
New buttons have been added to the safe balance popups, which when clicked show the budgets and transactions within that budget period, leading to the safe balance shown.
This provides better access to the information required to figure out why you’ve ended up with the safe balance shown in the application, and make it easier to course-correct as needed.
In order to give people who have some uncategorized transactions a complete picture, the Budget page now features a toggle in the toolbar to “include uncategorized”. This will add uncategorized transactions to the Budget Summary at the top of the page, and include an “Uncategorized” row at the bottom of the page.
Clicking this “Uncategorized” will take you through to a trends summary for your uncategorized transactions, which works the same as any other unbudgeted category.
A change has been released to display your bank logos alongside your account names for accounts connected to a feed, in the sidebar throughout the application as well as the Account Summary. This makes it quicker to identify accounts as being from a certain bank, especially when managing many accounts.
In cases where the account is not associated with a feed, you’ll see the first letter of the bank specified in the Account Summary in front of a coloured dot. This means that offline accounts will still be able to be easily distinguished from each other.
If you’re a beta user, you’ll now see a new option to activate a dark theme for PocketSmith, at the bottom of your User Preferences modal, as an alternative to the default light theme. As different themes are in beta, this is not perfect – but it’s still an improvement for people who prefer a darker application.
You can also choose an “automatic” option as well, which switches between light and dark mode automatically, based on your operating system’s appearance settings - particularly useful if you switch between light and dark themes in your operating system depending upon the time of day.
If you’re not already a beta user, just opt in via User Preferences » Beta settings, and you’ll see the new options pop up at the bottom of “Your details and options” then.
A new dropdown now appears to the top right of the category budgets modal, which lists all budgets within a particular category. This allows you to filter the budgets shown within to current repeating budgets (the default), all repeating budgets and all budgets (including one-off events).
This makes it much easier to nail down exactly which budgets are currently affecting your forecast, so that you can make any edits required to your ongoing budget.
Up until now, the rollover beta feature has only allowed you to reset an individual rollover amount for a period to $0. We’ve just released an update so that you can edit individual rollover amounts to any value that you require.
This allows for more fine-grained control of rollovers, without needing to resort to editing individual budgets with one-off events to account for changes in the rollover amount available in a category. This is especially helpful for people who people who have an existing rollover “balance” for a budget!
The “track balance changes” feature was released at the end of 2021, and is described in this blog post. This has been working very well for accounts which regularly change in value, but don’t have transactions that account for those value changes - like investment accounts.
In light of this, PocketSmith will now automatically turn this option on for any new investment accounts which are created via a Feed, or if an existing account is switched to the “investment” account type.
We’ve simplified a couple of systems related to auto-budgets and transfer categories, which leads to a much better experience.
Firstly, auto-budgets is now more stringent in creating budgets, which means you’re far less likely to have budgets created for small amounts - for example, a refund that you’d received in your “Groceries” category.
Secondly, fewer categories are flagged as transfer categories by default, based upon feedback from our users. This results in a better experience for people repaying loans and mortgages, as these categories will no longer be automatically flagged as a transfer.
Changes have been made to ensure that all transactions within an account on a single day appear adjacently to one another when ordering by date, instead of the transactions shuffling between accounts.
This change makes it easier to view transactions in a single day and the resulting balances of the account, plus ensures that split transactions will always appear adjacent to the original transaction.
In order to allow people to set up the transaction column chart to more closely match the Income and Expense report, a new configuration option has been added to the widget: “Income and expense transactions determined by category type”.
Activating this option will mean that the widget refers to a transaction’s category type to determine whether it should show within the earned or spent column. An example outcome of this is that refunds will now be taken in account, reducing the amount that appears in a “spending” column.
The next phase of the new transaction search in beta has arrived. Along with other small improvements, it introduces full management for saved searches and filters - so you’ll no longer need to turn off the new transaction search to manage these.
Along with this, the “Bulk actions” modal pop-up which appears when selecting transactions and clicking “More…” has received a redesign, when you’re using the new transaction search.
This completes the overall experience of this upgrade. We’ll be continuing to refine the user interface of the new search, after which we’ll release this as a public feature preview. In the meantime if you’d like access, please get in touch and let us know!
Not everyone wants or needs to have all available history imported for their feeds, especially when first getting started with PocketSmith. This has become particularly relevant as more data providers with access to larger transaction history - sorting through a full year of transactions can be laborious if you only want to start tracking your spending from today.
Now when you first set up a bank feed, or click “History settings” in the Manage Feeds page toolbar, you’re able to choose what date you want transactions from newly added feeds to import from. Note that this will not affect your existing feeds or transaction history - only newly linked feed accounts will take this setting into account.
Along with some other improvements for file imports which offer better progress monitoring for imported files, all imports are now able to be resumed, and will be remembered if you close the application.
For regular file imports for a bank, this means that you’ll be notified that the import has completed – or still in progress across – all pages of the application. This is displayed on the lower left, as shown in the screenshot. Clicking “Show” will show you more detailed progress.
This also means that for larger imports (such as when importing from other personal finance tools), you can close your browser window and come back at a later time to complete the final stages of the import, once the heavy lifting has been completed.
All widgets in the dashboard now take safe balance into account across the board, including the balance graph, total balance and account list widgets. These widgets will show the safe balance for activated accounts by default, and features a clickable balance information popup which shows related balance information.
There is still a bit of work to complete prior to safe balance being able to exit beta (not the least of which is full mobile support) - but this is a key component along the path to that.
A new option has been added to the merchant section of the transactions search, where you can specify “only” as a condition, alongside the existing “all” and “any” options.
This means that you can be super specific about what transactions you’re matching – for example, you can find transactions with only “Wool” as the merchant, without matching “Woolworths” transactions too.
Improvements have been made to ensure that a transaction doesn’t continue to be marked as a transfer, if that transaction is uncategorised or reassigned to a non-transfer category. This matches the existing behaviour where transactions are marked as a transfer, if assigned to a transfer category. This behaviour won’t occur if the transaction in question already has a matching transfer transaction (of the same date and amount in a different account).
This process will mean that less management of the transfer status of transactions is required, when recategorising transactions that automatic categorisation processes might have gotten wrong.
We’ve made changes to make the feed “synced” status easier to interpret, with a clearer display of how long ago the feed last synced. The colour of the “synced” status will also change from green to orange if the feed last synced more than 2 days ago.
These changes will make it easier to identify if something is going wrong, even if the official status of the feed is that it has synced.
We’ve been hard at work on a new transaction search interface, which we’re confident enough to release to limited preview. It’s still a work in progress, and features are still actively being added to it (such as being able to manage your Filters using this new interface).
Despite that, it’s certainly ready for everyone who would like to give it a spin at this early stage - just reach out to us and let us know. We’ll activate the ability to be able to toggle the search on and off from the User Preferences > Beta Settings area, so that you can control when you want to see the new search and not. Get in touch now to get access!
If you are using rollover on some of your budgets, you will now see an extra setting on both the Income & Expense and Budget pages.
The Budget page setting lets you choose if you want rollover amounts included in the budget bar totals at the top of the page. The Income & Expense report setting allows you to decide if you want the rollover amounts included within all totals in the report.
Previously, there was no option and the rollover amounts were always included. These settings provide you with more control over when rollover amounts are included, which is useful if you’re trying to compare what your income and expenses will be for a period.
Further improvements to how rollover amounts are shown on these pages are planned.
