PocketSmith Product Review

Why Download The PocketSmith App?

PocketSmith allows you to focus on what you care about – Money Management & Cash Flow.  Customize budgets to track and reduce your expenses in areas that are not aligned to your financial goals. Choose features that would enable you to design solutions that work for you now and into the future.  Use their calendar, cashflow and other reports to monitor your financial situation, and track your performance against your goals on a regular basis.  Be in control of your expenses by planning ahead and prevent those nasty bill shocks. 

What is PocketSmith and what are its features?

PocketSmith is a robust financial management tool and an easy-to-use personal finance software that is designed to make managing your finances simple and easy.  It is unique, engaging, positive and fun to use.  Signing up with PocketSmith is a simple four step process that can be completed in just minutes.  Take a tour of their site and see for yourself how PocketSmith works.

Dashboard

The Dashboard provides an over view of your current financial situation.  The page is sectioned for easy viewing, some of the key features I found useful are:

Your Accounts - This feature is a visual display of your income and expenses.  PocketSmith has the flexibility to manage and categorize transactions like salary, dividends, rent, entertainment, utilities, car payments, etc.  (Handy Tip): This feature is very useful to get an understanding of your current situation, information that you can use in the PocketSmith’s “Forecasting” section to alter your course and firmly plant yourself on the road to making your Financial Dreams a Reality

Recent Transactions – This section allows you to view your transactions by date, category type or amount.  View your transactions by selecting a date range, You can also group your transactions and set categories that suit your personal needs.  (Handy Tip): Check out PocketSmith’s “Timeline” section under Reports to see the cool stuff you can do – like adding photographs and descriptions of your expense, be it a meal at your favorite restaurant with friends or family, a holiday you were on, a picture of your recent purchase you are very excited about. 

Bill Reminders – at any given time know your “bills”.  Set reminders for upcoming bills to avoid overdue notices and reminders.  This feature gives you the ability to prevent cash flow problems in the future.

All Budgets and Overspent Budgets – This section presents you with the opportunity to take control of your finances.  By identifying the “unbudgeted transactions” you can then factor them into your future planning and avoid any “Bill Shock”

Your Balance “Today” displays your Income(s) and your expenditure at a glance in real time.  (Handy Tip): This section is useful for PocketSmith’s “Premium” and “Super” product platform as they have the added benefit of the Automatic Bank Feeds.  Both these platforms are paid services and, in my opinion, they are worth the price tag.

Budget Calendar

Another Key Feature I found to be useful and one that I can see being used to its fullest potential is the “Budget Calendar”.  Set your budget for different categories, especially if they are repeat items… you can select the account payment is coming from ie savings account or credit card?  Personalise it by adding notes and color code the category.  Update your balances moving forward without affecting past transactions.  PocketSmith also has the option to have visual displays of Actuals Vs Budgeted in the history section.

Looking towards Your Future Financial Goal… set yourself new budgets.  PocketSmith’s most unique feature is its financial projection model.  You can get very specific when creating expense and income budgets and you can make them for any time frame – weekly / fortnightly / monthly. 

Interacting with your budgets is super-easy using PocketSmith’s intuitive calendar.  Quickly review scheduled transactions and check your projected cash flow for any given day.

For starters you can use PocketSmith’s existing facility that can automatically set up a budget for you by analyzing transactions in each category.  You can “roll up” and summaries categories to give you the total amount in weeks / month / year – the settings are yours to choose.  (Handy Hint):  If your aim is to be “in control” of your finances in the future, it would be useful to use this tool and to learn how to budget as you can analyse your income and expenses through their “Actuals Vs Budgeted” displays.

Scenario Testing

Use their “Scenario Testing” feature to test out how changes in your finances impact your financial forecasts, create “what if?” scenarios to test the impact of financial decisions.  PocketSmith let’s you test these possibilities so you can proceed with confidence that you have based your financial decisions on numbers and data and not just on impulse or instinct.  

Reports

Last but not least, we get to the “Reports” section.  There are a few reports available to download and I recommend downloading these reports on a regular basis.  The information from these reports helps in creating a clearer picture of your situation and empowers you to make good choices and decisions for your future.  Cashflows, Trends and Timeline are my favorites

Cashflows

Put simply, its money coming in vs money going out (over a given period)

• If you have a surplus … give yourself a pat on your back.  You can now learn how and where to invest your money to create wealth.
• If you are in deficit… roll up your sleeves there is work to be done.

Trends

Trends is a visual display of patterns in your expense categories.  You can use it to adjust your spending habits to get yourself back on track.  Used in conjunction with the “Scenario Testing” feature to align your forecasts to actuals.

Timeline

How much does PocketSmith Cost?

PocketSmith offers three pricing plans

Basic – Free.  The Basic plan lets you work with 2 accounts and 12 budgets. It provides a 6-month projection. Automatic bank feeds are not available and you would need to manually import your bank statements

Premium – $10.95 per month (or $8.25 when paid annually).   The Premium plan offers automatic bank feeds, automatic and manual transaction importing and categorization. You can work with 10 accounts and unlimited budgets, plus a 10-year projection.

Super – $21.95 per month (or $15.58 when paid annually).   The Super plan includes all the Premium features and adds unlimited accounts and a 30-year projection.

PocketSmith’s Customer support

PocketSmith has a dedicated support team who are available via email to help you with any comments, inquiry or difficulty you might encounter with using their product.  I was pleasantly surprised at how quicky I received a response from their customer service team who provided me the information I requested and in addition extended personal one on one support to help me resolve the issue.