You Need A Budget

No, not trying to tell you to go get financial help. I'm on about home accounting software call 'You Need A Budget'. I first came across this when I got made redundant back in April 2010. I needed some way of keeping track of where every penny went. Having tried 'MS Money' (now free for home use), GNUCash (more suited to a large business) and 'Turbo cash' (a bit to simple), I almost gave up. However, my favourite website for the money-concious came-up with a good alternative called 'YNAB' (You Need A Budget).

YNAB is not a free program, but at under £40 it was cheap-enough to risk buying it, so in August that is exactly what I did. I was actually surprised how easy it was to use and carried-on using it until Feb. 2011 when I switched to using a laptop as my cataract had got to the point where I could no longer use a desktop comfortably.

Fast-forward to November and, with cataracts done, I decided to start using the PC again And decided to give YNAB another run. By this time, a newer version had been released, but being a skintflint, I resisted the urge to upgrade until Jan. '12.

The new version is certainly a lot 'cleaner' and has oodles more functions. The report module can produce reports as bar charts, pie charts or line graphs, but (and it is my only gripe), it is not possible to filter the reports to show each sub-category as a '%' of the overall spend. This feature would allow me to see how much of my monthly outgoings go on petrol, electricity, mortgage etc.
As the new version runs on Mac as well as Windows, My son now has it installed on his computer and even he can no start to understand where all his money is going. The hardest part is remembering to keep the accounts up to date, but do it weekly and you find it is only a half-hour job.

Is it worth using ?, I would say 'Yes'. The ability to actually throw-up a report that can show total outgoings per month v. income can quickly let you see which months are your most expensive and allow you to try and budget more accurately.