Archive for April, 2010

Maintain a “Fun Money” Envelope

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Many people believe that a budget is a just way to restrict your spending and “tighten the reigns.” While this can certainly be a helpful use of a budget in some situations, a budget should not be viewed as a way to squeeze all the fun out of life. I’ve found in my own life that having a budget has freed me to give more and spend more on fun stuff than I would otherwise.

Last summer, I wrote a guest post on the FMF Blog titled Freedom From Budgeting. I encourage you to read the article. It explores the freedoms that come from having a good budget in place.

Your budget should reflect reality, not your wishful thinking. It is unrealistic to think that you’ll never spend a penny on having fun. So, why not budget for this? I recommend creating a “Fun Money” envelope in your budget. My wife and I each have individual envelopes for this purpose. This is money that we can spend on whatever we want without needing to ask each other or feel guilty for busting the budget. I usually use mine for things like buying an occasional iPhone game or stopping at Brueggers Bagels for a coffee while running errands.

The point is that having such an envelope can really liberate you. If you tend to overspend on frivolous things, this envelope will reign you in and give you an allocated amount each month to spend. If you always feel guilty for spending on fun stuff, then this envelope will liberate you from constantly feeling like you’re busting the budget by buying a coffee.

Posted in Budgeting Tips | 764 Comments »

Quality Over Quantity

Monday, April 19th, 2010

One of the exciting things for me about starting my own company is that I have the chance to start on the right foot. Several years ago I read a collection of essays called Getting Real (by 37signals). The more I read the more I realized I had found a book that embodied my goals in software development. I started dreaming of creating a company built around many of these ideals.

NeoBudget is a service created by my company, Tebros Systems, LLC. Much of the foundation for Tebros Systems is formed by the “Getting Real” philosophy. The core essence of this philosophy is that it’s better to build a simple and small product that is rock solid, than to build a huge product that is everything to everyone and yet it’s unstable and buggy. It’s quality over quantity.

As I’ve created NeoBudget, I have always striven to keep this standard. There are many things that NeoBudget could do, but I would rather spend my time improving existing core features and making them even more rock solid. Quality over quantity.

Don’t get me wrong, I have plans to add many new features to NeoBudget. It’s not that these new features won’t come eventually. The point is that I will be focusing on the core features first. Once those cannot be improved any further, then I’ll move on to adding more new features. The benefit of this approach is less frustration to the end user of NeoBudget (e.g. you). You should never have to worry whether the system is going to work or not, and you should always have the utmost confidence that your budget data is safe and secure.

Posted in Uncategorized | 749 Comments »

Transaction Import Wizardry

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Before I had created NeoBudget I tracked my budget in a spreadsheet. This worked well, but it was very time consuming. My normal procedure was to print out my bank statement, then go down the list and enter each transaction by hand. Without fail when I reached the end I had mistyped a transaction or two and had to spend some time tracking it down. All told, I would spend about and hour or two every week updating my spreadsheet. I thought there had to be a better way.

The Import Wizard

When I created NeoBudget, one of the first things I wanted was the ability to import my bank statement directly. The import wizard in NeoBudget does exactly this. It has cut the time spent updating my budget down from 1-2 hours to 15 minutes per week.

Here’s how it works. It’s a simple four step process:

Step #1: Upload your statement

Step #2: Select the transactions to import

Step #3: Assign each transaction to envelopes

Step #4: Confirm that everything looks right

Manual Transaction Entry

Of course, it’s also possible to manually enter transactions. There are any number of circumstances where you might want to record a transaction before it clears the bank. My wife often records our grocery purchases right away so we can keep up-to-the-minute track of that envelope. I also record all checks we write so they come out of the budget immediately (you never know how long it will be before someone cashes a check).

To do this, simply click on the “Add $” or “Subtract $” tabs at the top of the page.

A question I frequently hear is: “Will I end up with duplicates for some transactions when I manually enter something and later import transactions from my bank?” NeoBudget is smart enough to notice duplicates. On the second step of the import wizard, NeoBudget will notify you of transactions it thinks you might have already entered into your budget. You can make the final judgment call.

The import wizard is a real time saver. For me, it saves at least an hour a week over my old spreadsheet budget. It’s just one of ways NeoBudget helps take the sting out of budgeting.

Posted in Tutorials | 1,107 Comments »

New Release, Long Overdue

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Today I am pleased to make some long overdue updates to NeoBudget. I’ve been working on these changes for the past 8 months. The unfortunate reality was that I have not had much time to dedicate to NeoBudget. All that has changed now that NeoBudget is my job. I’ve gotten more done in the past two weeks than I had in the past 8 months put together!

Going forward, it is my goal to push out new changes at least once a month. I’m already working on some new things for the May release and can’t wait to share them with you all.

“What’s new?” you may be asking yourself. Most of the changes are behind the scenes. Even though things look mostly the same, much of the underlying structure of NeoBudget has changed. This is the ground work for future enhancements. I won’t go into all the details of these back-end changes since you most likely won’t even notice them.

However, there are some things you’ll readily notice:

  • Larger font sizes. Everything is slightly larger in NeoBudget now. This should increase the readability and usability of the site.
  • Better support for Internet Explorer. Support for Internet Explorer has greatly improved. While some features work best in other browsers (like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari), NeoBudget is now fully functional in IE versions 7 and 8. If you are using IE 6, I highly recommend that you take advantage of the free upgrade provided by Microsoft. In fact, in the near future I will be dropping support for IE 6 altogether.
  • Subtle use of animations. There are several places throughout the site now that use subtle animations to help enhance the user experience. Two examples are dialog boxes fading in and out and form elements sliding in on the transaction page.
  • Calendar drop-down widget. Many users have requested a drop-down date widget on the transaction pages. Now when entering a transaction date, you can either type in the date or click the calendar icon and select the date from a calendar.
  • Import recovery. Before, if you started importing a batch of transactions and navigated away from the import wizard, you would lose the import. Now I have implemented an import recovery feature that detects the unfinished import and asks if you want to start where you left off.
  • Sign in detection. When you visit www.neobudget.com and you already have an active session, you will be prompted to continue that session instead of always needing to sign in again.

Posted in Announcements | 607 Comments »