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Welcome to PersonalFinancier!

This tool was created as a simple but powerful mechanism to track finances and activities.

Finances

PersonalFinancier is a tool to track expenses by category and then project forward what the budget will look like as you progress through the year.

How does that work?

Imagine you have a $100/month entertainment budget. If the first month you spend $90, everybody knows you did well... But how much can you spend per month for future months? Worse, though, what happens if you go crazy and spend $180 the next month? Now you know you're over your budget, but what does that mean?

In PersonalFinancier, you can check the Performance screen and you can see that for the two months you've been tracking, you've spent $270 ($90 + $180). Therefore, your average has been $135/month, an interesting, but not very useful number. Of more interest, it will tell you that your new monthly budget for food is now $93/month for the 10 months left in the year. If you can stay at or below the adjusted number, you'll still hit your budget for the year!

Activities

As the author of this software, I've been using it or another version for several years now, making a few entries every day. One of the most interesting things that I learned was that this tool doesn't just track your finances, it also indirectly tracks your life. If you think about it, there are very few activities that you do which don't cost a single penny.

Over the years, I do sometimes take a look back to see what I used to spend on things, but more often than not, I'm checking activities I've done in the past. For example, answering questions like "where did I go skiing last year" or "what did I get my Mom two years ago for the holidays?"

So, I've also added in a few simple fields to collect a little more information if you're so inclined. There's a place to enter some personal or business comments for the day, as well as make quick observations. I also like to know when I'm spending time with friends, so there's functionality built for that. If you find them useful, great! If not, they are not mandatory.

Tricks and Tips

When trying to figure out where to start, I recommend the following:

Initially, only create accounts that you're certain you'll use:
- For Top Level, I recommend keeping the number of accounts minimal (e.g. Food, Entertainment, Transportation, Miscellaneous, Gifts, Charity, Home). You can always add more later, and you can see details by expanding the tree on the Performance screen.
- For Child Level, create accounts only when interested in summarizing the expenses. For example, if you are interested in how much you spend at Burger House, create a Child for it (Food / Burger House), but if not, include the name in the description when entering it (e.g. enter Food, put 'Burger House - Salad' as the description). This will enable you to quickly find the expenses by using the filters, but not force you to setup lots of Child Accounts before using the system.

For budgets, use after tax (take home) figures:
- After creating your top level accounts, go to the Performance screen and right click on each row, updating budgets until the Original Monthly Budget total is equal to your monthly after taxes take home (e.g. if you earn $1000/month, but only get $750 in your paycheck, have the budgets add up to $750 in the summary bar under the table).
- Under Admin / Start Month, consider setting your fiscal year to begin with the month you started using Personal Financier (e.g. if you downloaded it in March, use that instead of January). That way projections will start out accurately. Once you've built up enough data, consider switching it to January, if your preference is to track budgets in line with the calendar year.
- Personal Financier does not track investments as there are many excellent tools elsewhere for this.

Download

If you'd like to try it out, download the executable for Windows, DMG for Mac, or the executable jarfile for other environments. It will automatically install a demo account (password demo) and you can use that to see its functionality with data populated.