What Makes a Good Home Budget?

With hundreds of home and personal budgets available at little or no cost, what do the best ones have that the others do not?

In our view, all budgets we are familiar with have accuracy for what they claim they do, so accuracy is a given.

But budgets also need to be current, and here some fall by the wayside by being linked to bank accounts, which are quite accurate manipulating amounts they have cleared, but are never current

Until a deposit or a withdrawal is received and cleared by the bank, it does not exist as a bank record, even if it is expected by automatic credits or automatic debits.  And amounts frequently change even for these.  So bank records, even online, are only as current as their last records received amd processed.

That is why it can be so misleading to rely solely on budgets tied to bank accounts.  The balance shown on your last withdrawal slip may be off by one or more items that have not been received or cleared yet, and online data is almost never in the order you write checks, authorize autopayments, or receive deposits.

Pagemonth Budgets show income and expense items by the date they are scheduled to occur.  When a bill is scheduled to be paid, the balance subtracts it for that day, even though it hasn't cleared yet.  When a deposit is scheduled to be made, it is added to the balance for that day, even if it hasn't cleared yet.

So Pagemonth Budgets show payments and deposits often not yet shown by bank data.  So it is much more current.

When its accuracy is eventually assured and confirmed by bank entry, a checkmark (forward slash) needs to be entered to the right of the amount on the budget.  The checkmark columns in all Pagemonth Budgets thus have a vital function:  to confirm transactions, just as date columns are used to crosscheck items between the Cashflow and Budget sides.

Our insistence on double entry of all amounts, once on the Cashflow side and again on the Budget side, provides a further confirmation of accuracy.

Another characteristic of a good budget is accessibility.  In our opinion every part of a good budget must be open to review and modification by its owner at all times.  And that eliminates the vast majority of remaining free or lowcost budgets. 

Pagemonth Budgets are totally user-configurable and user-accessible in every part, cell, element, item, formula, formattng, and function.  In fact, they could all be edited out of existence, deleted to blank spreadsheets once more.  There would be no practical reason to do so, but it does demonstrate that we mean what we claim.

Good budgets must also be private and secure.  We feel our budgets are both by not residing in a cloud  but offline, in your computer., with a copy saved to a usb drive or other removable device in case even your computer crashes (and who among us can honestly claim his never has!).  I save my working budget to my desktop, again to My Documents, and yet again to my usb drive.

I am not against the Cloud.  I don't mind storing music, photos, videos and other items in the Cloud.
But I will never store my home financial records in the Cloud.  Clouds have a way of vanishing, reacting to sunspots and radiation, evaporating and otherwise behaving badly.

And good home budgets are flexible.  They can be adapted to Church budgets, school budgets, small business budgets, governmental budgets, small manufacturing budgets, club or organizational budgets, and hosts of other uses. 

Pagemonth Home Budgets are flexible enough for any of these uses and many more, thanks to their total configurability.

Good home budgets are predictive.  They not only accurately show financial transactions from the beginning of a year to the present day, but also reasonably predict future transactions and balances through the year's end, with convenient means to adjust amounts as new information becomes available.

Further, good home budgets present comprehensive and pertinent data the user needs and wants, in a practical and convenient, clear format.  We believe we include such information on every Pagemonth page, from the chronological "checking account" mirror we call the Cashflow on the left columns, to the categorical groupings we call the Budget side on the right, divided by the Annual Summary Projections as they continuously update in our middle columns E and F, to the Month and Year Summary calculations of gain or loss at each page bottom right.

We could add that a good home budget might also need to provide visual appeal and an instant sense of one's percentages of income and expense categories, a snapshot of everything that's going on, with possible graphs or pie charts, perhaps even in color, added to the mix.  Pagemonth Home Budgets do not use graphics or colors to accomplish  these goals.  However, the Excel and MSWorks programs our budgets use do make these features available, if users want them.  It is very easy to graph or piechart any group of amounts by highlighting them and using the program menus.

We chose from the beginning to focus Pagemonth Budgets on numbers rather than on graphics, because numbers are necessary and graphics are for all their visual appeal really not necessary.  We believe we created a better home budget without them..