Budget Simple (www.budgetsimple.com) is a simple budget. Perhaps too simple.

The process is broken down into three steps. First, set up a budget. Second, record your transactions. Third, view reports reports on the result. All very simple and very easy to understand. The help section steps you through the whole process if you have trouble with it.

Something that is not obvious until you have used the site for a while is that every month is a new budget. The first time you log in at the beginning of a month you will have to create a new budget. Thankfully you can choose to copy the previous month’s budget. You are then free to make changes. In this way the budget can easily evolve and stay relevant. On the downside you can loose the sense of continuity from month to month. Budgets are goal setting exercises. One aspect of compelling goals is constant, measurable progress. Without being able to seen the progress from month to month you loose some of that impetuous.

The Budget Simple system encourages you to create a balanced budget every month. I am not entirely sure why this is promoted, it would seem to be prompted by the philosophy behind the budget though such a philosophy is never explained. You can always set up any excess income as a “Savings” category.

However while the site encourages a balancing of the books it does not go out of its way to help you do it. The total income, total expenses and the difference are not updated as you add and change categories. To get the totals you must reload the page. Similarly on the transactions interface while the totals for categories update with each transaction entered, the budget total is not.

Entering transactions is somewhat counter-intuitive. To enter a new transaction you do it from the transaction summary screen. When you save the transaction it disappears and updating of the category total is the only sign of its passing. The category total is now a link and clicking on it takes you to a list of transactions in the category. However the name of the category does not appear on the page – you have to remember what you clicked or work out where you are from the listed transactions. Transactions can be updated or deleted in the list, but new transactions cannot be added here – you have to step back out to the summary to add a new transaction. Also the transactions are in the order they were entered, not in the date they were paid.

I imagine a scenario where I want to enter a week’s worth of reciepts, but being slightly disorganised I may have entered some of them already. For each one I would have to open the transaction list to see if it is already there, then, when I was sure its not in the list click back to the summary to add it as a new transaction. The fact that the transaction list is in the order entered means that not only is it harder to locate previous entries, but if I do enter the same transaction twice they will not appear next to each other in the list, so the duplication will be harder to find.

Budget Simple is very new and still under development. This is made obvious by ocasional errors and by sections of the site with “coming soon” as their sole content. Maybe I have stumbled onto it too early in its development. On the technical side I can see it is written in PHP and jQuery 1.2.6. It is under active development and from the the personal tone of the home page appears to be the work of a lone developer.

Pros

  • Its 100% free.
  • Simplicity – It is very easy to fully comprehend a system this simple.

Cons

  • Too Simplistic.
  • Not very helpful – Small things like updating totals and ordering by date would greatly improve the usability.
  • Still in development – Expect bugs and changes. Many of the supporting features of the site are simply non-existent.

Cost

Free.