Windows Phone Thoughts: Watch the Pennies with Spb Finance 1.0

Budgets
One of the benefits of categorising your transactions is that you can then start setting yourself a budget. For example, you might allow yourself to go to the cinema a couple of times a month. With Spb Finance, you can keep track of how much you are spending in a category against the budget you've set yourself.

Defining a budget is easy - by going into the budget pane and clicking on New, you get the New Budget wizard. After picking the category and clicking on Next, you can decide how you want to define the budget. The software is really flexible - you have the option of specifying a fixed amount for every month or quarter, for the current month, quarter or year, or specifying different values for different months or quarters.


Figure 16: Choosing a category for the new budget


Figure 17: Specifying the time range for the spending limit


Figure 18: Specifying a spending limit for the current quarter


Figure 19: Specifying spending limits for each month

Once you've defined your budgets, the software shows how much you've spent and how much remains against the defined budget for the timeframe specified. You can pick arbitrary start and end dates, or the software provides a comprehensive choice from a drop-down menu. If you have overspent on your budget, it is highlighted in red.


Figure 20: Keeping track of your budgets


Figure 21: Specifying a time range for budgets

Reports
One of the strong features in Spb Finance is the report section. The software provides graphs for your net worth, account balances, profit & loss, spending by category, income & expense plus a report of filtered transactions.


Figure 22: The Net Worth graph


Figure 23: The Account Balances graph


Figure 24: The Profit & Loss graph


Figure 25: The Spending by Category graph

There are a lot of customisation options for the reports. For each report, you can specify which accounts are used, which categories are reported upon and which classes.