Budgeting for your financial health

Home Accountz is a brand new software application that helps you to take control of your personal finances. Simply setting up a budget to compare income and expenses can be the first step on a journey that will result in building data you can use to manage the key financial decisions in your life.

The different stages of family life tend to lead to changes that will have a big impact on household expenditure, like having a baby, getting married, changing schools, or children leaving school to go off to university.

Household income can change dramatically too. During the recession many adults in the UK have been made redundant, or have had to reduce hours and accept pay freezes to stay in a job. Of course Income can also increase through windfalls, promotion, and changing jobs, etc., all opening up new opportunities!

Home Accountz is ideal to use as a simple but very powerful tool to look at the year ahead. You can create and save as many budgets as you like to look at all of the possibilities, and even to consider ‘what if’ scenarios. The budgeting tool is intuitive and powerful. You can insert an annual total for an account which will be evenly distributed throughout the twelve months of the year or you can set up the distribution for each account using a slider, or input the figures manually if you prefer. Home Accountz is so flexible that you can have as many accounts as you like and you can have accounts within groups and sub groups according to the structure that reflects your needs. As you populate an account you will see the group within which the account resides changing to reflect the sum of all of the parts. You can then look at your budget at a simple macro level or expand the chart of accounts to show all of the parent and child relationships within the Groups at the micro level! Remember the devil is in the detail!

Once you have built a budget to mirror your chart of accounts you can then track actual income and expenses against it. If you have forgotten to budget for certain income or expenses it is very easy to edit your budget or you can refine the budget when you come to create it for the next 12 months. If you are happy with your budget and don’t want to make any changes then you can lock it. At the end of year you can archive it which means that you can still access it to review your financial history.

If you find your planned expenditure exceeds your income having all of your expenses presented in one view allows you to plan a course of action that can lead to positive change. It has long been said that ‘what gets measured gets done’. By looking at the budget you can rank the essential from non essential expense categories and make some decisions to change the status quo before your finances become unmanageable. You can also target certain areas for cost reduction. There are so many price comparison websites that allow you to check out the best deals around. Don’t forget that if you budget to reduce energy costs based on a pitch from an energy provider, with Home Accounts you will be tracking actual expenditure against your budget and can check to make sure that the deal really was as good as it was made out to be. If not you’ll be ready to check the market again!

If your income is increasing then a budget allows you to plan for extra treats and luxuries and/or forecast how much surplus income you will have at the end of each month/year, after all of your financial commitments have been taken into account. Perhaps this is money that you want to pay into a tax free or long term savings account or use to pay off your mortgage?

Setting a budget puts you in control of your finances leaving you to enjoy the important events in your life.

Home Accountz is a multi platform personal accounting software package that will run on PC, Mac or Linux, can be installed on up to two computers and retails for £39.99.