Many of us don’t budget because we don’t see the value in it. Others might simply have no desire to budget, because we don’t want to spend time on it or we fear what we might find.

Unfortunately for some, this lack of money management can lead to serious financial strife. We have come to a point where we easily buy on impulse with no thought to the consequences. 

In order to reverse this trend, people must become more responsible with their spending. One of the best tools to help someone accomplish this is a personal budget drafted up and kept to.

A budget is a personal financial plan which sets limits on the amount of money you can spend on anything over a particular period. The budget can be set out for a certain period, broken up into weeks or even days.

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Calendar-based budgeting is here! Our budgeting system has been totally revamped to give you greater granularity when setting your budgets - we believe this will cut down a lot of time for you, especially when setting recurring items.

Budgeting

• Our calendar-based entry allows you quickly set your budget amounts at the day level. We still retain our previous “quick edit” interface for those who prefer the higher level approach.
• Recurring amounts can be set to repeat every week, fortnight, month, 3 months, 6 months, or annually.
• More comprehensive forecasting allows you to predict your future financial position and compare versus your actuals.
• Print directly or export your budget data to CSV.

Notifications

• In final testing is our notification system - receive regular updates on your iCashbook profile delivered to your inbox. Ties in very nicely to the budget updates and coming soon.

Also, just a reminder that iCashbook Personal is in public beta and is currently free - so sign up now for a test drive!

A few small usability enhancements this release:

• Login to iCashbook is now available via our updated website at www.icashbook.com
• When navigating between tabs on the Start page and Dashboard page your last selected tab is now remembered
• iCashbook Accountant administrators can now specify one or more advisers when adding a client business - this allows an employee of an accounting firm use of an additional filter when managing their clients’ businesses from the Start page. This option can also be specified on a per-business basis for each adviser on the business details tab of the Start page.

This release focuses mainly around financial period management for iCashbook Standard, in an effort to add more automation and require even less effort by you. Financial periods in iCashbook Personal continue as always to be fully handled by the system.

Financial Periods

• Initial setup of an iCashbook Standard business now includes selecting the start date of your current financial period. Based on what you enter we will automatically add the first period for your business, and add any following or preceeding periods automatically on an as-needed basis.
• The financial period management window (accessed from the business details tab of the start page) has been updated to allow you to change the anniversary date of your financial periods.
• Financial periods can now be locked by either you or your Adviser. While a period is locked, any editing or uploading of transactions is disallowed until such a time that the lock is removed.
• Financial periods can now be started mid-way through a month and will run for a full 12 months. This will result in 13 tabs appearing in the transaction schedules for you to move between each month.

Other Updates

• Type-ahead has been added to the transaction schedules for the account code field, allowing for quick coding by those who know an account code and wish to use the keyboard.
• Our tax rate system has been enhanced to handle tax rates that change by date (such as the upcoming NZ GST rate changes) - you don’t have to do anything!