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February 28, 2012

PocketSmith – Look Forward With Your Finances

PocketSmith is a personal finance tool with all the bells and whistles. The online money manager does a little bit of everything, offering features that can help people remember to pay their upcoming bills, avoid overspending during the holidays, itemize their transactions before tax season, and get information about their future financial forecasts.

If you’re currently using a handful of different money management tools to handle your finances, then PocketSmith has an idea: stop. The comprehensive web-app believes people would be better served by using a single, unified financial application where they can review all their money issues from a single vantage point. When you create an account and hand over your banking information to PocketSmith, you’ll be able to keep an eye on all your transactions across multiple credit cards and checking accounts on one single screen. You can also choose to upload each of your transactions manually, although that obviously takes much more time and energy. Based on the transactional information that PocketSmith gathers – combined with other data that the app can pull based on your regular bills and deposits – the application will create an interactive forecasting graph that gives you a glimpse into your financial future.

When you’ve left the future and come back to today, you’ll want to head over to the Goals and Calendar sections to see what kind of impact regular purchases will have on your ability to reach the financial milestones you’ve set up. The forecasting tools make it easy to see how spending $10 a week on coffee adds up over time, and users can view whether they’re on a trajectory to meet the financial goals they’ve set. Overall, PocketSmith is a great tool for people who need a little extra nudge to push them to save.

Practical Uses:

  • Find out how much more you need to save for the big vacation you’re planning
  • See how much you’ve spent at Starbucks over the past year
  • Check out graphs that show whether you’re on track to retire by age 65
  • Keep itemized transaction lists that show all your deductable expenses

Insider Tips:

  • Users can link their bank accounts to PocketSmith or manually upload their transactions
  • PocketSmith uses bank-level security to protect its users’ information
  • Calendar-based functions can be exported to iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook
  • PocketSmith works with Windows, OS X and Linux

What we liked:

  • PocketSmith uses repeat financial events to forecast the future
  • Users can list all the things they’re saving for in the Goals section
  • PocketSmith can determine how close you are to reaching any goal you’ve set
  • Users can compare how their projected financial outlook is actually comparing to where they’re currently at

What we didn’t like:

  • It’ll be hard to get people who are happy using Mint to switch over to PocketSmith, despite all the additional features

Alternatives:

Company Info:

  • Launched: 2008
  • Privately Held
  • Headquarters: Dunedin, New Zealand, and Auckland, New Zealand
  • Founded by: Jason Leong, James Wigglesworth, and Francois Bondiguel
  • Web site: http://pocketsmith.com

Costs:

  • Free plan
  • Premium plan is $9.95/month
  • Super plan is $19.95/month


Comments

  1. Johnathan Garber

    For alternatives, I’d like to add http://www.balanceforecastingapp.me

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