Pocketbook Valentine's Day Contest

So Pocketbook, one of my most often used and, if I've managed to get onto the topic of personal finance in conversation, most recommended apps, is currently running a Valentine's Day contest. They're asking people to write about their experience with Pocketbook for the potential prize of $175.61 (the average amount men spent on V-Day last year, according to Forbes), and I thought 'Well, I could kill a few birds with one stone here'. Firstly, it gives me a topic to write on, which is partly a reward in itself. Secondly, I get to shout about Pocketbook, which I think is awesome. And finally, who couldn't use an extra 175 big ones? So I'm going to walk you through how Pocketbook makes my personal finance life awesome.

I installed Pocketbook sometime towards the end of last year, and after setting it up it has made things a breeze. Setting up involves somewhat dauntingly handing over your account information for the accounts that you want to sync, but Pocketbook have some pretty damn good security policies and procedures, so have no fear. After syncing the accounts you're interested in, it gives you a nice summary of your net financial position in the 'Accounts' tab.

The next step of setting up is categorising your transactions. Thankfully, Pocketbook uses some form of technical witchcraft and automatically categorises most of the transactions you've made, so it is really more of a check of the categories it has put them in and doing the ones it missed. It'll even pick up your regular bills, so that you can see when they're coming up. Once the categories are set for particular transactions, they stay that way when you make the same type of transaction in future (e.g. Spending at Coles is 'Groceries'), so you only have to really categorise transactions for new places that you've spent money. You can also mark transactions as 'important for tax' or 'one off payments', attach photographs of receipts, or add location information.

If you wish, you can also set a safe spending limit, which tallies up your transaction against a reference period (say, a week) and lets you know each day how much you have left to 'Safely Spend'. I believe they have updated this feature recently so you can set this period to whatever you would like, for example to reset on Thursday each fortnight.

Now, finally the exciting bit. As most of you know, I'm a pretty big data nerd. I like spreadsheets, I like graphs, I like information about things that most people find tedious or have no desire to measure; my mother-in-law bought me a FitBit for Christmas last year and I now wear it everywhere. So suffice to say, Pocketbook has some kick arse analytical capability throught the web app. Unfortunately, this feature is not yet available from the mobile platform, but they're working on it. Anyhow, I've been putting together my own monthly financial statements using Pocketbook since about October last year and it has helped me tremendously. With Jess and I trying to scrape together a house deposit, knowing where your dollars go is extremely powerful to make behavioural changes. Jess and I have since put our credit cards on ice (quite literally), and have at last count saved a bit over $25,000 towards our house.

Screenshot of Pocketbook's Analyse

In summary, I can't recommend Pocketbook highly enough - it's awesome. Get Pocketbook!