Since the time of my posting about buying this, I've now gotten it 100% set up with all of my bank accounts, including personal and business in one file.
I'll be entering transactions as I go, daily, into iBank, which I use to keep track of business down to the penny, which makes taxes a piece of cake when that rolls around. It's just bookkeeping. But I'm going to also enter the transactions into YNAB as well for management. After a few months I should be able to see where overhead is walking, where I'm not investing, where I'm over-investing without proper returns.
As far as my personal life goes, I'm following the four YNAB rules they talk about on their site. I've assigned every dollar a job. This software is the only one I've ever used or seen that actually can handle every aspect of your finances while still allowing for budgeting (future planning) as well.
With the iPhone app I now have with everything synced up to Dropbox, I can enter payments on the fly wherever I'm at. Even at my desk if I don't want to fire up another piece of software.
It's got a nifty little "Available to Budget = $____" box that you want to keep at zero all of the time if you're a regular day jobber with schedule paychecks. They want you to get the income, then assign it, then spend it. Obviously that doesn't work for us with all the crazy Net-90, Net-30, Net-Nope, etc.
That actually let me get around the "Play it as a zero sum game" rule they want you to follow. So I went ahead and allocated monies to all of the jobs I created for the money for May. Now my "Available to Budget" is a big red negative number. I love it. That's my "break even" goal for next month. Anything beyond that will turn into a white $0 and then a big green $xxxxxx saying "You've got a shitload of extra money to assign!" At the end of the month, I'll assign it to increase my padding/buffer in different accounts, put it towards savings, or use it to further invest in the business by increasing the job budgets for the next month.
It's almost like a video game at this point.
It generates a lot of nifty graphs, pie charts, trends, blah blah that help you get further insight into your spending. I've not gotten to play with it because I don't have enough historical data yet. But it seems like it will be very valuable. The way they've set up credit cards and mortgages and other debts is awesome too. But I don't have debt cuz I'm a bowse. But I watched a video on how it works and I was impressed.
It works out quite well for us online SEO/IM folks. Give it a whirl if you've been dissatisfied with every other software.
If you're interested, here's a link they sent me in an email:
YouNeedABudget.com - Discount Coupon
It saves you $6, and the incentive for me is I'm supposed to get $6 too, but big whoopty. I'm sure the payment threshold is set to infinity. I didn't sign up for their program so I won't be seeing any monies. Point being, that's 10% off for you if you want it.
Holla
