Keeping track of your money these days is as easy as using your cell phone. Here are the best calendar-based personal finance apps.
Sometimes managing your finances is harder than earning the money in the first place. Thanks to our modern technology, though, there are now a lot of interesting and creative ways for you to keep track of your spending. For example, you can use a smartphone to track everything from your investments to you daily spending.
1. Money Calendar
This app is best for managing personal expenses, but it can also work for simple business income and expenses. It’s a desktop-based app that lets you project your account balances and overall savings easily. You can divide your expenses into different categories. And it gives you several auto-generated charts to keep tabs on your spending month by month.
With Money Calendar, managing and maintaining multiple accounts is a little easier. It has multi-currency support, so you won’t have problems when transferring money between accounts. Monthly budget and expenses are easy to monitor because of the clean layout of the calendar.
Rylstim’s images are colorful and attention-getting. You’ll find the graphics good and easy on the eyes. This simple-looking layout holds more than meets the eye.
2. Calendar Budget
Calendar Budget is best for your desktop. It’s a simple app that allows you to do a lot of things for your finances. You can keep track of your money using a calendar that acts like a financial planner. Your budget is categorized, so it’s easy for you to take note of every financial move you make. You can set your expenses to different frequencies: one time only or repeat. If you repeat a particular expense, it will automatically update according to the time that you set it to. No need for you to worry about forgetting to set it up.
Calendar Budget also shows your daily expenses. What’s more, you can program future expenses and set financial goals. You can also bookmark important financial events the same way you do with all those parties you attend. Finally, to make sure that you never pay a bill late, you’ll get email reminders before your bills are due.
3. PNC’s Virtual Wallet
This budgeting tool requires an actual bank account with PNC. But it can be a good option if you’re also in the market for a new checking account. Virtual Wallet actually comes with several budgeting tools, including a money bar that lets you quickly see how much you have in spending, saving, and long-term savings categories. But it also has a calendar that shows your upcoming transactions and a projected account balance.
If there’s a particular time of the month when it’s easier for you to overdraft your account, you’re in luck. Virtual Wallet will alert you with “Danger Days.” These are days coded red on your calendar when you’re likely to have a very low account balance and are most likely to unintentionally overdraft.
In all, these are great tools to budget with, especially if you need a simple way to budget through your joint checking account with your spouse or significant other.
4. Google Calendar
If none of these apps sounds appealing to you, you can sort of create your own approximation of a calendar-based budgeting app with Google Calendar. Basically you color code a budget calendar with scheduled incoming and outgoing transactions, as well as scheduled bills due. You won’t get fancy alerts or balance projections. But this is a simple way to keep track of the ebb and flow of your finances. You can get a more in-depth tutorial here.
Calendar budgeting certainly isn’t the only option. And you might even decide to use a calendar-based budgeting tool in tandem with another of our favorite budget tools, such as Personal Capital. But these options can help you more easily track
Topics: Budget
Looking into apps to do what I’ve been doing on paper for years. Want calendar based with money tracking features (daily bank balance) but would like to be able to switch from monthly to weekly or even daily view. Any of these apps do that? Just started with Dollarbird but free version doesn’t allow weekly view which I primarily work off of because of amount of data.
I agree, not happy at all that calendar budget is going to charge. There is no link above to click on for Money Calendar, can anyone help?
PNC bank has a calendar view as part of their virtual wallet package. I love it. Don’t necessarily love PNC though. Came here looking for another bank that offers a similar calendar view. Can’t seem to find any. Amazing to me. So many people I know live on Outlook at work and/or Google calendar at home. But practically zero banks offer a calendar view for financial transactions. Surprising to me.
My saved file doesn’t stay saved on Money Calendar.
Calendar Budget would not hold the data correctly. Category editing would not save changes. I entered. You get what you pay for I guess & in this case it’s “free”, so I just deleted my account. Not worth the time it took to enter all the data to end up with inaccurate information. Big disappointment.
Calendar Budget works for me. It is the best one I’ve found to meet my financial management needs.
Calendar Budget is working like a charm for me too. Absolutly LOVING it. My brain functions visually and I have always had to plot out bills on a calendar in a self built budget book…. BUT With CB I don’t have to do the math now, which saves me HOURS from every pay period.
No longer free and you MUST have Paypal hence why I’m on here looking for something comparable! Sad, really liked them.
Do you guys know if Rylstim Budget can project more than a few years? I downloaded the trial but it seems to only allow me to go up to 2 years or so then it stops. IF i pay for it will it unlock features to project further into the future? 10 years or so
I’m surprised that CashControl wasn’t mentioned. It did miracles for my personal finances and is one of the best personal finance apps. For me it worked perfectly.
It doesn’t look like it fits the category of being a calendar-based system like the two that are pictured above.
I’ve been using rylstim for a while. It seems to work well enough and is only lacking a couple features I’d like.
A major feature would be a way to sync it up with my phones calendar or notification system, so my phone can harass me when my bills are due.
Pocketsmith seems nice, but does it have a desktop app as well? I’d like to get reminders on my phone, but actually using the phone to manage expenses can be a pain.
I haven’t thought about using financial calender apps to date I’ll have to look into this as it seems like a good way to do some of my budgeting. Especially for the bills that have cut off my paper bill (my reminders)!
CalendarBudget also has a mobile version of the web site. Using your Android or iPhone browser and going to http://calendarbudget.com will automatically show the mobile version, which uses the same data from the desktop browser version.
Plus, CalendarBudget is completely free 🙂
Not any more! $3.99 pr month / $47.88 pr year
I am very upset with the now $4 per month Calendar Budget. I LOVE your program. It is intuitive and easy to use, however NOT worth the $50 per month. That is an almost unheard of amount of money to pay for an app that has as much competition. $10 per year would be acceptable, but $50 is ridiculous. Sadly, I’ll be saying goodbye to Calendar Budget.
Yes me too !
Me too. $4 a month is absurd!!! Too bad, Calendar Budget. You had a very good program, and I would have been happy to pay a reasonable price to stick with it.
I’m leaving calendar budget too – apparently google calendar does just as good a job – may have paid up a buck a month but 4 is ridiculous for something you can do on a spreadsheet pretty easily
Actually, I think Calendar Budget is way worth $3.99/mo. I’ve been using Quicken for 10 plus years but primarily just for doing what Calendar Budget does so much more easily. I’ve spent more on Quicken – keeping up with the current version every year – and with the issues I started having with the 2018 version, I’ve switched all my income and expense tracking to Calendar Budget and am very happy with it.