BudgetPulse

BudgetPulse is a new financial management service in closed beta that aims to simplify the way you manage your money and track budgets. It allows you to manage multiple accounts and track income, expenses, assets, bills, and more. Additionally, BudgetPulse lets you set goals which assists you in tracking and recording how much money you spend over certain durations of time. (weeks, months, years, etc.) If you’re looking for a financial application with all the usual Web 2.0 design elements, BudgetPulse may be the service for you. You’ve got your gradients and reflections, Ajax calls with every action, and of course, neat JavaScript slider effects. I can’t say I’m a fan of applications that over do it with Ajax, but enough about that and let’s get started. Logging in to BudgetPulse will direct you to the Dashboard showing a brief overview of your financial situation. You can see each of your accounts and their balances on the left as well as upcoming expenses and expense categories that are close to going over budget in the middle. BudgetPulse also aggregates financial news from top financial news sources like Google and Yahoo! which can help you plan your spending and budgets accordingly. You can also search through all of your transactions using the search form on the right column. To get an account up and running, head over to the accounts area in the tracking section. You can add an account and set its opening balance, then start adding expenses, sources of income, and recurring payments like bills. BudgetPulse also allows you to make a money transfer from one account to another like real banking. Additionally, you can categorize each transaction you add to an account so BudgetPulse can later group the transactions and base them against your budget goals. Expect to type out the category every time you add a transaction though as BudgetPulse does not pre-populate your list of your categories for you. As you’ve probably guessed, BudgetPulse helps you create and track budgets on the expenses your make. It groups up each expense by the categories you create and allows you to set a specific budget amount to an expense category. So, for example, if I were to add a couple transactions with the category, “entertainment”, BudgetPulse will show that category in the budgets area and allow me to set a budget amount to it. It will then display a simple bar that compares how much I have actually spent on entertainment and what I have budgeted. At default, it bases the data on a months time, but you can set a date range at the top. After getting some data into BudgetPulse, you can view charts and summaries on your financial activity. The charts are especially useful because just seeing your expenses visually can be a real eye-opener and help you better plan for the future. There are three different charts: Expense allocation (pie chart), monthly expenses shown by day (line graph), and monthly expenses shown by month (bar graph). The BudgetPulse summary section allows you to view each transaction category and narrow down into each category showing totals of the last four months and the overall difference of your income and expenses.