The post A Flurry of New Transaction Management Features appeared first on Weekly | A Better Budget App.

Getting your transactions automatically downloaded from your bank helps take away the headache of manually entering transactions. Now, with automatic notifications, you can be alerted when new transactions have been downloaded and are ready for review. Additionally, you can now see transactions even after they have been confirmed.

Notifications

Notifications can be a powerful tool to alert users when new information is available or to prompt action. In the latest version of Weekly, you will receive two types of notifications. First you will receive a notification when new transactions are ready for review. By tapping on this notification you can go into your tracker and review the transactions.

The second type of notification you will receive is when a new week starts. This notification will remind you to review your last week and start a new week with a new allowance. . These notifications are designed to nudge you to keep your Safe-to-Spend number updated and stay on track!

In future releases we’ll be implementing notifications for other helpful features like when recurring expenses are coming up or when you hit goal milestones.

You’ll be prompted to turn on notifications as part of the onboarding process. If you declined notifications but want to turn them on now, simply go to your Settings app > Notifications > Weekly > and toggle the Allow Notifications switch on.

Viewing Bank Account Transactions

We have added the ability to see all the transactions in bank accounts you have connected to Weekly, and to see if you have added them into the Tracker.

You can view all transactions by going to the accounts tab and clicking on an account. This will pull up the account detail screen where you can see a list of all transactions for that account. Each transaction has the date, the label, and the amount. Transactions that have been reviewed will also have an indicator of the action you took (daily, recurring, or ignored).

When new transactions come in, you’re prompted to review each one and confirm it as a Day-to-Day or Recurring transaction, or optionally ignore it. By looking at the transaction in the bank account view you can see in what action was taken for each transaction.

• Daily — Transactions that have been reviewed as classified as Day-to-Day.
• Recurring — Transactions that have been marked as representing a recurring transaction that has been setup in Weekly.
• Pending — Transactions that still need to be reviewed.
• Ignored — Transactions that have been reviewed but purposefully ignored.
• [No label] — Transactions with no label are for weeks that were not reviewed.

Seeing all the transactions for your account and what action was taken on each one serves as an informal reconciliation to ensure you’ve accurately recorded all your spending.

Interested in More?

We’re working on creating a community where we can share content, answer questions, and build financial freedom. Get involved and stay updated by:

Listening to our podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/weekly-budgeting/id1471179700

Joining our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/386489425308570/

Or drop us a line at support@weeklybudgeting.com.

Happy budgeting!

The post App Notifications and Viewing Bank Transactions appeared first on Weekly | A Better Budget App.

When you connect your financial institutions to Weekly, your transactions are automatically downloaded to help keep your budget up to date.

This week’s release adds the ability to view what institutions are linked to Weekly. This allows you to check your account balances, choose which accounts sync to Weekly, and remove institutions when necessary. Let’s review these changes in more detail.

#1 View and Manage Accounts

When you link an institution to Weekly, all the accounts associated with your credentials become available to sync. These institutions and related accounts are now visible on a new Accounts Tab. Accounts are listed in this tab along with their balances.

There may be some accounts associated with an institution that don’t relate to your personal spending (like an investment account or business account). Since the transactions for these accounts don’t reflect your personal spending, you can disable syncing them so transactions don’t show up to be reviewed.

Tapping on an institution shows a page where accounts can be disabled/enabled. Simply toggle the switch to disable or re-enable syncing an account. This page also enables updating your credentials when necessary. If you change your password for an institution, use this page to update it and keep syncing.

#2 Removing Institutions

In some cases you may want to remove an institution entirely. When you delete an institution, all information associated with the institution will also be deleted. This includes accounts, account balances, transactions, and the security credentials used to access your institution. You can add back the institution in the future if needed.

To delete an institution simply tap on the institution and press Delete Institution.

#3 Updated Guides

With the new tab added for Accounts we’ve moved the guides to the settings page. If you’re new to Weekly or want to learn more about how to use Weekly — take a look at the guides! Guides are written to help bring users up to speed with Weekly concepts.

Also we want to give a shout-out to Kory Ball, one of our Weekly beta users who volunteered to make several grammatical corrections to the guides. Thanks Kory!

Interested in More?

We’re working on creating a community where we can share content, answer questions, and build financial freedom. Get involved and stay updated by:

Listening to our podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/weekly-budgeting/id1471179700

Joining our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/386489425308570/

Or drop us a line at support@weeklybudgeting.com.

Happy budgeting!

The post Account Management appeared first on Weekly | A Better Budget App.

This week we’re bringing some exciting improvements to this process!

#1 Select, Update and Create Recurring Items

Your weekly allowance is based on your recurring income and expenses so keeping these accurate and up-to-date is critical! This week’s update brings the ability to associate transactions with specific recurring items or create new ones.

Whenever a transaction comes in you’ll be prompted to review it. If the transaction is based on a recurring expense, you have three possibilities for how to handle the transaction.

1. Confirm a transaction matches a current recurring item. If the transaction amount matches an existing recurring expense, Weekly will pre-select it on the review screen. All you need to do is confirm it. This transaction does not affect your Safe-to-Spend.
2. Create a new recurring item based on the transaction. If the transaction is for a recurring expense you haven’t already added, you can create a new recurring item right from the review screen. Simply press “Select a recurring item” and then tap “Create a new recurring item”. This item will change your weekly allowance amount beginning with the current week.
3. Update a recurring expense to the new amount. If your recurring expense changes Weekly won’t know which expense to pre-select. In this case you can simply tap “Select a recurring item” and then select the item that matches the expense. When you confirm the transaction Weekly will prompt you to update your recurring expense with the new amount.

Let’s go over that third scenario. Let’s say you have a Netflix subscription for $10.99. If Netflix raised their prices and is now charging $12.99 your recurring item will need to be updated. When the $12.99 transaction comes in it won’t match your existing $10.99 recurring expense. In this case you would tap on the “RECURRING” tab and select “Netflix” from your list of recurring items. When you confirm the transaction Weekly will ask you if you want to update your Netflix expense to $12.99.

#2 Linking Manual Transactions

Some users prefer to enter transactions manually even when their bank account is linked. This approach immediately updates your Safe-to-Spend number without waiting for transactions to post from your bank.

In most cases, manually entered transactions will have the same amount as the corresponding transaction from your bank. When a match is found Weekly will “link” the two transactions together and add a checkmark to the transaction on the Tracker page. Since you’ve input the transaction manually you won’t be prompted to review it.

In some cases however the amount from the bank may not match what you manually input. This often happens when you add a tip to the purchase amount. Manually adding a transaction for the full amount will make sure your Safe-to-Spend is accurate, but when the transaction comes in from your bank, the pending amount won’t match.

Weekly now supports creating this link when reviewing a transaction. Any manual transactions that aren’t already linked will show under the DAY-TO-DAY tab. Tapping on a transaction and pressing “Confirm” will create the link. When the transaction posts for the full amount it will have already been linked and you won’t need to review it again.

Below is an example of a purchase at a Sushi restaurant. The charge was $32.09 but the tip brought the total up to $38.00. When the pending amount posts from the American Express account, the amount is shown for $32.09. Since you know this is for the “Sushi” transaction, simply tap the “Sushi” item from the options and press “Confirm”.

Interested in More?

We’re working on creating a community where we can share content, answer questions, and build financial freedom. Get involved and stay updated by:

Listening to our podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/weekly-budgeting/id1471179700

Joining our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/386489425308570/

Or drop us a line at support@weeklybudgeting.com.

Happy budgeting!

The post Transaction Review Enhancements appeared first on Weekly | A Better Budget App.

Weekly is designed to change behavior. It does this by giving you one financial number to concentrate on: your Safe-to-Spend amount. Your Safe-to-Spend amount is the amount of money you can feel good about spending knowing that it’s there and spending it will not wreck your finances or keep you from meeting your financial goals. Day-to-day transactions come out of your Safe-to-Spend amount, and you’ll always know how much money you have left to spend for the week.

With Weekly, it’s not necessarily recommended (and definitely not required) to categorize your day-to-day transactions. We believe that over-categorization frustrates the goal of keeping you on track and can inhibit you from spending your money in a way that brings you joy. Instead, concentrating on spending less than your Safe-to-Spend amount — regardless of what you spend it on — gives you a sense of control without setting unnecessary boundaries.

Tracker Page

This is the page where you see what you can safely spend at any given moment, what you have spent in the past week, what your current Allowance is, and whether you have applied your Rollover. Let’s break down each part of this page.

Your “Safe to Spend” Amount

The Safe-to-Spend amount is what you can feel comfortable spending through the end of the week. It already takes into account the recurring expenses and savings goals that you have entered as part of your onboarding as well as your day-to-day transactions and rollover Allowance from previous weeks (see below).

To get your Safe-to-Spend amount, start with your Allowance, add in your Rollover, and subtract any day-to-day transactions that you’ve entered.

Safe to Spend = Allowance + Rollover — Spent

Let’s break these numbers down a bit more.

Allowance

Your weekly Allowance is what you start the week with to spend and each new week your Safe-to-Spend number will start with your Allowance number.

Your Allowance is your recurring income minus your recurring expenses and savings goals divided out into a weekly average. (For more information on how we calculate your weekly Allowance please see the Guide “Finding Your Allowance”)

Rollover

When a week ends, one of three things will have happened in regards to your Allowance. You will either have spent less than your weekly Allowance, more than your weekly Allowance or exactly your weekly Allowance.

The amount of money you have left over at the end of any given week (or not left over as the case may be) is called your Rollover.

In Weekly, you can choose to add last week’s surplus or shortfall to this week’s Safe-to-Spend number by tapping on the rollover number itself. If you happened to have underspent the week before, then you can choose to apply that to the current week’s Safe-to-Spend number to boost up the amount of money you can spend this week. If you over-spent in the previous week, you can keep yourself on track by turning on the rollover feature, which will reduce Safe-to-Spend number for the week.

Spent

Spent is a total of your day-to-day expenses for things like groceries and gas in any given week. These purchases will reduce your Safe-to-Spend amount, and the tracker page will show you exactly how much you have left to spend. All of your day-to-day transactions for the week, get added together to make up your spent number.

Entering Transactions

You enter day-to-day transactions by clicking the blue “+Add” button on the Tracker Screen. This will prompt you to enter a transaction. Type in what the transaction was, then pick the date of the transaction in the slider at the bottom. The transaction will be entered, show up on the Tracker Page, and reduce your Safe-to-Spend amount.

Please note: Let’s say you received a bonus at work or some birthday cash. If you want to add this money to your safe to spend you can do that as well. Simply select “Income” at the top of the transaction screen.

If you connect Weekly to your bank or credit card account, Weekly will download your transactions for you and then you will be able to add them to your “Safe-To-Spend”, mark them as Recurring or Ignore them altogether.

What to do if you are over or under budget

If you’re continuing to be under budget week after week, this is great news! You might consider setting a more aggressive savings goal. You can either update your current savings goal or add one by going through the onboarding process. To do this, select the icon with three dots in the bottom right hand corner of the app, then select “Redo Onboarding.” By setting up a savings goal for emergency savings, a house, or a vacation, you can smooth out rough patches in your financial life and start to build wealth!

If you’re continuing to be over budget week after week, then here are four options to get back on track.

1. Reduce recurring expenses — Consider how you can reduce some of your recurring expenses. Can you take a roommate? If you have a car loan, could you sell your car and getting a less expensive one? Look over your recurring expenses and try to eliminate or reduce them.
2. Increase recurring income — Increasing recurring income might mean asking for a raise at work, finding a new position at a new company that pays more, or taking on a second job.
3. Increase one-time income and reduce debt — You can take temporary jobs for more income. This will give you more money to spend on a weekly basis and if you apply it to your debt, give you a higher Allowance.
4. Reduce spending — The fourth way is to spend less on your day-to-day transactions. For example, if you are eating out a great deal, could you cook more at home. Could you take the bus to work instead of having a car? It’s not glamorous but it’s effective. Your reward will be in hitting your savings goals and having enough money to go on that vacation!

Practice Makes Perfect

Remember, whether you have money left over or you spent a little too much, your weekly Allowance is added into your Safe-to-Spend amount each week. You may have a little more or less if you have the rollover feature turned on, or it will start completely fresh if you have the feature turned off. Because your weekly Allowance is added in again each Sunday, you have 52 chances to start over in a year (rather than the 12 you’d have with traditional budgeting systems). Going from no budgeting system (or an old system) to the Weekly budgeting system may take some time to get used to, but you don’t need to fret if you make mistakes because you can start again each week.

The post Tracking Daily Expenses appeared first on Weekly | A Better Budget App.

One of the problems with traditional budgeting is it’s hard to know what number to concentrate on. One approach is to give everything dollar a job and track all the money you are spending by categories. But this makes the process cumbersome. “Is that Amazon purchase household or groceries?”, for example. Half way through a month, it can be hard to know if you have over-spent in one category and under-spent in another, and if that is the case what does that mean. The process can be so cumbersome people give up. There’s got to be a better way.

When I was attempting to re-imagine the process I thought about what would be ideal. The better solution I thought would be to have one number to concentrate on that as long as you didn’t spend over this amount you would be OK. This number would take into already take into account all of your regular income and committed expenses so you could be assured that as long as you spent less than this number, you would be in good financial health. This would eliminate the confusion of categories and make budgets easier to understand and stick to.

This is the idea behind the weekly spending limit.

Here’s how the idea works, each week at the beginning of the week, you add your weekly spending limit to a set of money called your “Safe-to-Spend”.  Then you use your Safe-to-Spend to purchase the things you need in your day-to-day life.  But how much money should you be allowed to spend every week?

Let me explain how we figure out this number.

First, to simply the process of budgeting, we break down spending into two types — Recurring and Day-to-Day.

For example, let’s say you make $5,000 a month but $3,500 of that is already spoken for by way of a mortgage, car payment, insurance, and other recurring expenses. That leaves you with $1,500 per month ($346.16 per week) to spend on day-to-day expenses like groceries and clothes.

Understanding the difference between recurring and day-to-day expenses is the first step to using Weekly. Let’s walk through some examples to make the differences clear.

Recurring Items

Two tell-tale signs of a recurring expenses are that they happen at regular intervals and are generally for the same amount. Also, these items can usually be set up to process automatically and include things like your paycheck, mortgage/rent, car payment, and insurance. You’ll input these items when you sign up for Weekly, but you can always edit them later if they change. Once you’ve input your recurring items, Weekly will provide you with your weekly Allowance that can be used for day-to-day expenses.

Paycheck (Income)

Assuming you have a consistent paycheck, you can set the amount and frequency of your paycheck in the app to determine your weekly income. Having an average weekly amount of income helps avoid overspending on payday.

If your primary income source varies, we recommend you enter a conservative average income based on your past 6–12 months. While you could enter your variable paychecks as day-to-day income, using a general estimate to enter your regular income as recurring will help you get the best value out of Weekly’s budgeting system.

Loan Payments

Loan payments are the simplest form of recurring expenses. They occur at regular intervals for a consistent, predetermined amount. Weekly will prompt you to add recurring expenses for different types of loans including mortgages, auto loans, student loans, and personal loans. You can always add your own custom loan descriptions as well.

Utility Bills

Utility Bills are considered a recurring expenses. If you are paying a different amount each month based on usage, we recommend enrolling in an equal payment plan if it’s offered by your provider and using that number. You can also take a look at your past 12 months of bills to get an average amount and enter that amount in Weekly.

Savings Goals

Savings goals are a critical part of a successful budget. You want to save for emergencies, vacations or big life events to make sure the money is available when you need it!

Within Weekly, a savings goal operates the same as a recurring expense. The purpose of the savings goal is make sure you are not spending money you need for another purpose in the future. Like other recurring expenses, savings goals lower your weekly Allowance so that you have money saved for each of your targets.

These recurring items are all entered.

Day-to-Day Items

Day-to-day expenses are one-time purchases that are generally paid for with cash or card. These expenses are not included in your recurring items and are recorded on the Tracker Page.

Let’s go through some common examples.

Food

Although groceries and dining out are expenses that happen regularly, (gotta eat, right?) because the amount you spend and the frequency of food purchases vary, these expenses are considered day-to-day expenses. For example, the amount you spend on groceries varies greatly based on the food choices you make each week. Note: One exception to this rule are subscription services like Blue Apron. Because this is a regular expense that is automatically withdrawn from your account, it’s a recurring expense.

Household

Those trips to Target or purchases from Amazon are considered day-to-day transactions that should be entered in the tracker.

Gas

Gas fill-ups are considered a day-to-day expenses. This is because using a car is voluntary for some people who could use a bike, the bus or the subway to get to work. Also, gas expenses can vary based on extra-curricular travel. But, if you feel you need to budget some amount for gas as a recurring expenses so you don’t accidentally spend your Allowance and have nothing set aside to fill up the tank and go to work, then it’s okay to estimate the amount will spend on gas and enter it as a recurring expense.

Irregular Income

Day-to-day items can also include irregular income like bonuses, birthday money from Grandma, or income from a side job. If this income is not included as a recurring item then you get to decide how to use it. You may decide to pay off debt, put that money into savings, or simply spend it. If you’d like to spend the money, simply add the amount you’d like to spend as an income transaction within Weekly. This will increase your Safe-to-Spend amount.

Your Weekly Spending Limit

Your Weekly Spending Limit is calculated from figuring out what is left over after you subtract your recurring expenses from your recurring income. Your Weekly Spending Limit is added to your Safe-to-Spend amount at the beginning of your week, and your day-to-day expenses are taken out of it when you enter them manually or by download them from your bank or credit card inside the Tracker. By breaking down finances into weekly chunks, Weekly makes spending easier to manage. By staying focused only on spending less than your Safe-to-Spend, you’ll be able to spend confidently knowing everything has been factored into that number.

The post Your Weekly Spending Limit appeared first on Weekly | A Better Budget App.

The post Redefining Budgeting appeared first on Weekly | A Better Budget App.