This week, our digital marketing contractor Brendan Brooks from HyperWeb Communications is a guest blogger as he takes a look at a cloud based personal finance application PocketSmith.

Recently my wife and I need to assess our personal spending to see what we could afford to allocate to an investment. It was also timely to have a look at our personal spending as it sometimes seemed there was too much month left at the end of the money. I use Xero for my company, so went looking for something similar for personal bookkeeping. Sadly Xero canned their Personal account, but another New Zealand based Cloud system PocketSmith seemed to offer the features I was looking for.

Saving money can be quite hard work, especially when your spending patterns can’t be accurately assessed and visualised, PocketSmith allows for budgets to be set, goals set, and spending planned. Because it can sync with your bank accounts (or you can upload an export file of your bank statement if you are not comfortable with live synching) you can instantly see the categories that are dominating your spending and put into place a budget and discipline to start saving for your personal finance goals. You can forecast when you are able to afford those large purchases such as an investment property, a new car, a boat, or a holiday for the family.

PocketSmith features:

• Live bank account feeds with Australian Banks, Building Societies, and Credit Unions
• Multi-Transaction editing
• Ability to allocate a category to a payee is handy as the software will automatically recognise and categorise a transaction.
• Split transactions into separate categories.
• Cashflow reports and calendars
• Scenario tools to assess future decisions
• Once set, you can see a history of spending by category and total, and the time taken to process transactions is minimal.

Information and data is essential for financial planning, when you know where your money is going, you can make decisions to reduce spending and increase savings. Pocket Smith offers this in an easy-to-use software platform. Unfortunately they don’t offer a free trial, but they do offer a free account and their tutorials are excellent. Take a look on their website: http://www.pocketsmith.com