Budget4All Manage your personal or family budget
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Budget4All Description

The Budget4All application was designed to be a Java desktop tool intended to help you manage your personal or family budget in order to forecast your cashflow, in an easy but powerful way. It is all about BUDGET FORECASTING : the key principle adopted by Budget4All is to take into consideration the FUTURE incomes/expenses expected. Consequently, this is not the right tool if you want to enter your past bills, to print checks, to know how your money has been spent for the past year, etc. The data displayed always starts with tomorrow's cash balance. The Concept of “Scenario” Data is organized around the simple concept of a "scenario", which is essentially a file containing a set of incomes and expenses that you specify according to your own needs. You may define as many scenarios as you want (there are just files anywhere on your computer). Each income or expense you define has several properties attached, such as the actual amount, the frequency, the starting and ending date, the annual growth if any, etc. You just set the values you want ! When Budget4All loads a scenario, it automatically runs a simulation using the data it contained and display the result in the main window as red curve that represents the evolution of the cash balance for the next 50 years. The first day covered by the simulation is actually the day after today. It is possible to specify an annual inflation rate for a scenario. It can be a simple constant number (e.g. 4%) or a complex table of values (you specify the rate for each year). The inflation is applied to every income/expense of the scenario on the first of January of every year, unless you have specifically indicated that inflation does not affect the income/expense when you created the definition (see the “add effect of inflation on top of annual growth” checkbox) You can export all the scenario data to a web browser or a CSV file (so you are not locked in Budget4All !). You can also encrypt the content of your scenario file and password protect it, if you want the information to be kept strictly confidential. Displaying your data The starting amount of cash you have as of “today” ("today's balance") can be specified in a text box at the bottom of the screen. This is usually the first thing you do when opening a scenario, since Budget4All has no means to know this information. You can change easily the duration of the time period displayed on screen using the “time interval” combo box (e.g. 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, etc). You can also easily move to the next or previous period (e.g. the next 3 months) using the “left and right arrow” buttons in the lower right part ot the main window. See the Keyboard Shorcuts item in the Help menu to perform these operations in a fast and convenient way. If you click with the mouse inside the curve area, a crosshair appears at the nearest data point on the curve. The data point identify a set of incomes and/or expenses that occur on a particular day. Usefull detailled information about the data point selected appears on the right part of the screen. Editing your data The “Scenario -> Edit” menu allows you to painlessly edit the full content of the scenario, that is : adding / modyfing / deleting incomes or expenses. setting scenario information, like the title, a long description, the annual inflation rate, the currency used (hundreds are supported) The table of incomes / expenses can be sorted by any of the column shown, in incresing or decreasing order : just click on the column header of the appropriate column to do so. You can enable or disable any income / expense defined. This is very useful to test the effect of different incomes and expenses for the evolution of the cash balance. The disabled items are NOT taken into account by the analysis performed in the “Tools->Analysis” fonction. For every income / expense shown, there is a very useful “impact per day” number displayed that calculates the daily equivalent ! That allows you to quickly check what are the items that have the most impact in the scenario ! When the edition of the scenario data is completed, it is essential that you click on the “Apply” button for the changes to be committed and the cash balance curve to be updated. Note that the changes are NOT saved to disk in the scenario file ! You must explicitely use the “Scenario-> Save” or “Scenario -> Save As” menu to do so ! Analysing your data The “Tools -> Analysis” menu displays a window that shows the results of 4 real-time analysis conducted on the current data of the scenario : “Cashflow by weight” displays a pie chart that compares on a relative basis all the incomes / expenses for a given period (by default, the same that the one used for the curve on the main window). You can easily change the period with the spinners provided. “Financial Events” provides a detailed list of all financial events (occurence of an income or an expense) that occur for a given period. For each of them, the number of occurence and the total amount is provided. You can easily change the period with the spinners provided. “Monthly Stats” is a report that provides a monthly total of all incomes and expenses that occur during a given month and the associated total. “Yearly Stats” is a report that provides a yearly total of all incomes and expenses that occur during a given year and the associated total. Please note that this is NOT a calendar year, but a 1-year period starting from the next month. Main features: See graphically the evolution of your cash balance (cashflow) through time, at any given moment in a period covering the next 50 years ! Specify painlessly all your forecasted income/expense budget items Perform automatically different types of analysis on your data Optionnaly protect access to your data through encryption and password protection

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