How does it work?

CoreBudget does not make you enter your expenses manually like some systems. Entering financial transactions manually is error prone, time consuming and completely unnecessary. Instead, CoreBudget imports your actual bank transactions from your bank accounts which allows CoreBudget to instantly show you complete and accurate up to the minute details on all of the money moving in and out of your bank accounts.

It then allows you to create categories and categorize your spending in different areas (Gas, shopping, groceries, utilities,etc) so that you can see how much money you are spending and in what areas you are spending it. You can view chronological and categorized listings of your transactions for any date range you choose.

And finally, CoreBudget allows you to create quick and easy budgets which you will be able to build in minutes and then run budget comparisons against your actual spending so that you can see if you are meeting or exceeding your budget goals.

Everybody categorizes their spending differently so how does CoreBudget categorize spending the way you want it? Luckily, CoreBudget is a great student. The first time that you import bank transactions, you will teach CoreBudget how you want it to assign categories to your spending (ie should a transaction be considered Gas, Groceries, Utilies, Clothing etc.)

Once you tell CoreBudget how to categorize a transaction, CoreBudget will categorize it automatically every time in the future using CoreBudget's smart categorization feature. The figure below shows several transactions from a bank account. Several of the transactions have been categorized appropriately and one is unknown. CoreBudget has highlighted the unknown transaction in red. The user will need to tell CoreBudget how to categorize this transaction and it will remember how to do it from this point forward.

Figure 1: Click the button next to "None" to assign categories to unkown transactions.

Nearly every bank and credit union offer online banking today and every online banking system allows users to export their bank transactions easily. Your online banking system will provide these transactions to you in one of several universal formats. CoreBudget currently supports the following two universal formats.

• OFX format (Open Financial Exchange Format also called Microsoft Money format)
• QIF format (Quickbooks Interchange Format)

In the future we will be looking to expand CoreBudgets functionality so that it can automatically download transactions from your online banking. However, this process is complicated and unsupported by many major financial institutions. We will be researching effective ways to accomplish this in the future.