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.
All new bank feed accounts created after today will default to using the transaction / card swipe date for transactions, instead of the posted date, when possible.
The transaction date is the date that you actually transacted, whereas the posted date is when the bank actually processes the transaction. Often these are the same date, but sometimes - for example on weekends - it can take a few days for the transaction to post / process.
In cases where this data is available to us (and it’s not in all cases, especially for open banking feeds), it’ll mean that your dates in PocketSmith are far more likely to match the dates seen in your banking apps, and also results in better alignment for spending inside budget periods too.
Older accounts can have this optioned turned on for them as well, just get in touch and we can activate this for you!
In order to ensure we’re delivering the most accurate and timely bank feed support possible, we’ve introduced a new system for getting support for any bank feed issues that you’re experiencing.
After clicking on “Feed help” from the main help menu, you’ll be guided through specifying the issue that you’re experiencing, what feed you’re having trouble with, and any additional information needed so we can help you as swiftly as possible.
You’ll spend less time requesting help now, along with fewer back-and-forward emails between yourself and the support team to provide all the information needed to get you the help needed.
You can access this new feature now by navigating to the help (?) menu and clicking “Feed help”.
The transactions page now lets you search for transactions which don’t have specific labels, by choosing “none” when choosing some labels in the search form. In this mode, only transactions that have none of the selected labels will be returned.
This comes along with a tweak in the way that the label search options are presented: there is now a dropdown with the three options within it: any, all, and none. The “all” option replaces the “Match all” checkbox that was previously used.
This new capability will be extremely helpful especially when combined with other search fields, and once stored as a saved search, will be great for use in various Dashboard widgets.
Now you’re able to click the roll-up icon on the right of each row in the Income & Expense report to roll-up the numbers of a child category into its parent.
The roll-up status is kept consistent between the Budget page and the Income and Expense report, to ensure simpler comparison between individual categories across these features.
This change also adds guidance alongside the sum totals that appear at the bottom of the table, in the cases that the numbers include hidden categories or exclude rolled-up categories.
It’s not always clear what category settings have been applied for a particular category. And as it’s a key part of how category-based budget reporting is performed, this setting is now front-and-center on the Categories page. It’ll show as either “Income”, “Expense” or “Expense and Income” depending on the category type settings which are applied.
In addition, the category type will now automatically change to the correct type, if you edit the only budget in the category to be a different type. So if you accidentally create your “Wages” budget to be an expense budget at first, editing that budget to be an income will have the category type change to income.
