PocketSmith is a best-in-class personal budgeting tool but for using it to be a pleasure rather than a chore, you need to temper your expectations about the journey you’re about to take.
Categorising your first transactions takes time
Typically, when you connect a bank account, PocketSmith downloads three months of transactions. When I first joined PocketSmith this equated to 600 transactions. Depending on the account and your spending habits, this could be the same for you.
PocketSmith won’t tell you that it’s going to take you a good few hours to categorise these transactions. Fortunately PocketSmith allows you to categorise transactions in bulk. And fortunately it’s super easy.
Actually, there’s a lot of benefit to taking the time to categorise these historical transactions.
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You need to decide on your income and expense categories. Looking through your transactions is a great way for you to work out what they should be.
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As you categorise, you can set up rules that will automagically categorise your future transactions so you don’t have to. The better your rules, the less work you will have to do categorising in the future.
Tip: Transactions often include unique reference numbers that make automatic categorisation impossible. When creating rules, remove the unique part of the rule description. PocketSmith will have no trouble matching on only part of the merchant name.
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Familiarising yourself with the transaction search and the variety of dimensions through which you can view your transactions will put you in good stead for the future.
The PocketSmith learning curve is steep
PocketSmith won’t tell you that at the beginning it can be a bit of a mind screw. At one level PocketSmith is simple – transactions, categories, and budgets. But personal finance isn’t always simple. You have a mortgage. You want to use rollover budgets. You want to nest categories. And all the while you want to know that the figures add up.
You can get away with using PocketSmith without ever looking deeper than its most basic features, but you will never experience the power PocketSmith can give you over your finances.
Invest some time to learn how PocketSmith works. Ask the community of PocketSmith Pals on Facebook. Dive into this website. You will be grateful you did in the long run.
There is a “right way” to use PocketSmith
People have all sorts of budget arrangements of varying complexity. One person might have one account for everything. Whereas another might have a bank account for every budget category. I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say PocketSmith won’t tell you that over time, we all figure out that making the most of PocketSmith means simplifying as much as you can with your bank and relying on PocketSmith to handle your situation instead. Don’t get me wrong, PocketSmith is definitely powerful for you to throw all sorts of complexity at it. I’m just saying that, if you watch the chat in the PocketSmith Pals Facebook group, there tends to be a regression to the mean. Through information coming from PocketSmith, through PocketSmith Pals, and this website, you’ll learn how best to lean on PocketSmith for yourself.
