Do you want to easily follow your personal finances on your computer? Forget old -fashioned solutions like Microsoft Money and discover this new free application that exploits the famous envelopes method.
Who says new year often says new projects, and to carry them out, strictly managing their personal budget is a necessity. Many applications exist to follow its finances, such as the venerable Microsoft Money, still as popular despite stopping maintenance over fifteen years ago, or the excellent Money Manager Ex, free and regularly updated.
As effective as they may be, these two software (and others of the same kind) suffer from some faults that can be crippling for certain users. Their graphical interface is often austere and their operation complex, which makes them unpleasant to use, and they focus above all on the accounting of operations, rather than on budgetary planning.
In recent years, a newcomer has appeared in the court of personal finance applications, and very quickly gained popularity: Budget news. Initially accessible online, the project met with such a success that it has to briefly close the registration at its service last year … before returning as a free office application for Windows, MacOS and Linux!
Actual Budget is therefore a personal budget management application, the particularity of which is to rely on the budget envelopes method. This financial organization system consists in distributing his money, in liquid form, between different envelopes, in order to allocate a maximum amount not to be exceeded for each category of expenses or to accumulate savings for a project.
This method is particularly popular and appreciated, because it is much more intuitive and adapted to individuals than conventional accounting. But obviously, managing all your money in the form of species in envelopes is not very practical, in addition to presenting some safety risks. The promise of news budget is therefore to combine the effectiveness of the envelopes method with the flexibility of digital tools.
The application first allows, like the others of the same kind, to follow its bank accounts by recording all its operations, and by classifying them by categories of expenditure and recipe. But above all, it makes it possible to distribute its resources between different virtual envelopes, with a maximum amount not to be exceeded. The balance of the envelope is calculated according to the operations entered, which greatly helps to respect its objectives.
In case of exceeding, the deficit is immediately reported in red, and it is then necessary to draw in another envelope to fill it. Conversely, if an envelope is not fully used, its balance is postponed to the following month and is added to the new envelope. This system, in addition to helping to maintain a financial discipline, also makes it possible to gradually constitute provisions for annual expenses, such as its home insurance, or for unforeseen events, such as repairing your car.
And it is actually only a small part of the current budget functions. The application has for example an excellent calendar system, to plan and automate recurring operations such as subscriptions, a set of dynamic graphics easy to use, research and filter functions to quickly find operations, and Even customizable rules to automatically classify transactions.
In addition to being equipped with a modern and elegant interface, the application is therefore very powerful and flexible, which may require learning time. Actual Budget fortunately has ultra -complete documentationcovering all the subjects of its configuration to its use. This is entirely in English for the moment, but it can be easily translated using any internet browser worthy of the name.
Finally, Actual Budget allows automatic synchronization between different devices (computer, tablet, smartphone). To take advantage of it, however, you must manage your own personal server, or go through a paid service provider. The project team recommends the Pikapods service provider, for a sum of € 1.2 per month, but you can obviously use the service of your choice. Note also that if you have an online storage space, like OneDrive or Google Drive, you can register your Budget Actual files to synchronize them between your different computers.