After a year or more of searching for a tool to manage our finances, we finally found something that is working for us – Buxfer! I have tried just about every piece of software or website out there (seriously – 10 different apps for the Mac, and about 15 different websites) while continuing to use a really old version of Quicken for the Mac. Nothing had all of the features we wanted at a reasonable price until I re-stumbled upon Buxfer a few days ago.

Here were the features we were looking for (in order of importance):

• Flexible Budgeting (create our own Budget categories in variable timeframes)
• Reporting on spending in budget categories (how much do I have left for groceries?)
• Split transactions (including negative splits – i.e. a portion of my paycheck goes towards paying for health insurance, so that would be a negative split when my salary posts)
• Import of data from Quicken & from banks

Screenshot of Buxfer from the demo

Setting up the accounts to import the data was a snap, and I loved that all of our accounts could be imported every day automatically (there is also a feature to make this more manual if you are worried about security). Once the accounts were setup, then I went about importing the years of transactions from Quicken. This mostly worked well – if a bit slow, although the split transactions didn’t show the split, so I had to edit those by hand. Making the splits was very easy, and tagging items is so seamless. One great feature that is missing from Quicken but is in Buxfer was the ability to tag a transaction as a transfer – this was one of those “why doesn’t everyone do this?” moments. Overall, setting up the accounts with all of our data went well.

Once all of the data was tagged, I went to go manage the tags, and was glad to find that you can group tags under other tags. This allows us put each of our different utilities under one tag called utilities, but still see the individual utilities. Once the data is all tagged, then you can see a list of all of the transactions for that tag, and in your pie charts see how you spent by main tag (i.e. utilities instead of each of the separate utilities). The reporting is pretty nice and gives you a good understanding on spending habits, income, and a pretty funny graph of account balances which looks like the stock market in our case (ups when we get paid, downs when we pay a bill). There are some improvements to be made here, like an easier way to see graphs over time for a specific tag, but if you know what you are doing you can find out the info.

From there we setup the budget information from our zero-based budget in Quicken. This is the area that could use more work, but at the same time has features that were so much better than a lot of other tools. Creating a budget category was so simple and extremely flexible. We put in some items that were yearly and others were monthly, but they had a bunch more options (like every 2 weeks). The budget categories are based on the tags that you setup, so you could have one budget that had a whole bunch of things (i.e. the utilities like above). Once you create a budget, it instantly tells you how much you have left in the budget. If you are over, it shows it in red, and you can have it notify you by email when you go over in your budgets. My only desire here would be to have budgets that could be defined from sub-budgets, but that is just as easily solved by making more budgets for different levels of information. Also, it would be nice if you could do a zero-based budget in Buxfer (it lets you add budgets at any level no matter what your income), but this is also easily solved by using a spreadsheet to balance it out, paper and a calculator, or use Dave Ramsey’s Gazelle Budget Light.

On the really cool feature side, they have all kinds of mobile support, including having a special email address that you can send a text message to so that you can see how you are doing on a specific budget or to add a transaction. So very cool. There is even a dashboard widget for the Mac

Ok, so this may have been a fairly geeky look at financial tools, but it has been such an exciting thing for Joe and I (we’ve been up very late in the night this week playing with it) that we wanted to share it with you.

P.S. Buxfer has 3 different account types: the first one is free, but only lets you have 5 accounts and 5 budgets; the second one is $2/month and lets you have unlimited accounts and budgets – we actually got a free upgrade to this because I forgot that I had signed up a long time ago and they let people upgrade for free who had been around a while; the latter one is $3/month and gives you no ads and the new features (they say there will be envelope budgeting!)