Quik Budget

A Quick Overview
What's New
Quik Start
Everything about Quik Budget
Excel exporter
How to Register
Using Quik Budget with Account Mangers
How much does it cost?
Download

A Quick Overview

A wallet is something you keep money in to buy things. Unfortunately, most of us have only one wallet and the money flows in and out for all of our purchases, and we get to the end of the week wondering where it all went. Imagine how much easier it would be to stay on budget if you had 10 or 20 wallets that you filled every payday. You would know instantly if you were eating out too much if your dining wallet was empty on Tuesday. The problem is, my pants don't have enough pockets.

Quik Budget solves that problem by allowing you to create many virtual wallets in your PalmPilot. Just tell the wallet how much to add and it will do it for you every week, 2-weeks, half-month or month. The wallets can overflow into *Savings if you were particularly frugal one pay period. QB gets you started with Dining, Entertainment, Groceries and Household wallets.

Spending money from wallets is easy. Just click on the name of the wallet and add a new transaction. Enter the amount and a comment about the purchase. If you enter the same comment again later, QB will auto-fill for you. QB also includes a tax and tip calculator. After you hit OK, QB will deduct the money from the wallet and add the transaction to the list.

It has never been easier to stick to a budget. If it is 4 days to payday and you only have $7 left in Dining, you know it is time to start eating at home (or someplace really cheap.)

What is new in Quik Budget 2.7?

For those of you who are already familiar with Quik Budget, here is a quick rundown on what has been added in this version:

What was added previously:

How does it work?

For those who want a quick tour, try the Quik Start by clicking here. If you want to know everything you'll ever need to know about Quik Budget, click here.

Quik Start

Everything You'll Ever Need to Know about Quik Budget

Main Wallet List:

When you start Quik Budget, you begin on the Wallets List. By default, Quik Budget will create *Savings, Dining, Entertainment, Groceries and Household wallets. You can create additional wallets by tapping the button. Set your payday with the button. Use the button to get a list of all transactions to date.

You can edit your budget and the amount remaining in your wallets directly in this form. You can also use the List/Quik/Edit button to either List transactions in the wallet, enter new transactions quickly or edit the wallet details.

You can use the list in the upper right to filter out wallets you are not interested in. This list will make much more sense after you read about Wallet Details and Sub-Wallets.

If you are running the QMate enabled version of Quik Budget, you can click on the QMate tab to go directly to QMate.

Pay Period:

One of the first things you will want to do is setup your payday. Hit . Choose how often you get paid and set the date of your next payday.

If you choose monthly, you can select to have the payday automatically occur on the last day of the month. If you get paid either monthly or semi-monthly, you can choose to have Quik Budget skip weekends. With this option, any paydays that land on Saturday or Sunday will automatically be moved forward to Friday. Don't worry if the date still shows as being on Saturday or Sunday in this dialog, the payday will still occur on Friday.

 

 

Wallets:

To create a new wallet, hit New. Enter the name of the wallet, the amount you want to allocate each pay period and the amount you have left until next payday. You can have up to 16 master wallets but later in this document you will learn how to make almost unlimited sub-wallets.

Every payday, the "Amount per pay period" is added to whatever is left in the wallet. If, for instance, you allocate $100 to dining but only use $50, on payday you will end up with $150 remaining in Dining. If you want to prevent this overflow, you can put a check in "Send to <Wallet> if over:" and specify a cap. Then the overflow will be entered as a credit in the specified wallet.

Tip: You might want to have two wallets overflow into each other. For instance, Dining into Groceries and Groceries into Dining. Then anything left over in one will go into the other. If both wallets end up overflowing, the remainder will automatically be sent to *Savings.

Once you have setup a wallet, you can edit the amount per pay period and the amount remaining directly in the main Wallets screen. You can get back to the Wallet Overview screen by clicking in either numeric field of a wallet, hitting Menu and choosing Edit Wallet. Alternately, you can click the List/Quik/Edit switch until it says Edit. Then you can just click on the name of the wallet you want to edit.

Tip: From the Expenses and New Expense forms, you can edit the wallet details by clicking on the name of the wallet at the top of the form.

 

 

Wallet Details:

If you tap the button from the Wallet form, you will be presented with a few advanced features. These are:

1. Sub Of: Please see Sub-Wallets below for details.

2. Personality: This determines what kind of calculator the wallet uses. These include None, Tax, Tip, Tax & Tip and Fuel.

3. Favorite: This allows you to mark the wallets you use most. Then you can set the main wallets list to display only your favorites.

4. Private: You can also mark a wallet as private. Private wallets do not show in the Wallets list unless you have your PalmPilot set to show private records in the Palm OS Security application. If you are going to let your spouse borrow your PalmPilot, for instance, you may want to hide your Gifts wallet. Without the password, nobody will be able to see any evidence of the wallet including any of the transactions.

5. Cumulative: You probably want this on. With it off, the wallet will always be set to the budgetted amount on you payday. With it on, the budgetted amount will be added to whatever is currently in the amount remaining field. This is the recommended setting.

 

Sub-Wallets:

Quik Budget 2.0 adds the concept of sub-wallets. A sub-wallet is contained in a master wallet. You can make a wallet a sub-wallet by using the "Sub Of" list in Wallet Details. After you choose a master wallet you can choose the type of sub-wallet you want. There are 4 type:

1. Independent: This is essentially the same as a master wallet. It is simply contained within the master for organizational purposes.

2. Shared: Share sub-wallets have their own values for Budget and Remaining but any expenses are deducted from both the sub-wallet and the master.

3. Percentage: With these, you can specify a percentage of the master that you want to use for the budgetted amount. The remaining amount may be freely set. Like Shared, expenses are deducted from both the sub-wallet and the master.

4. Minor: These are great for minor wallets that you want only for documentation purposes. They do not have independent Budget and Remaining values. Expenses are simply deducted from the master. As an example, you might want to have Car Wash, Routine Service, Oil Change, Major Service and Parts as minor sub-wallets of your Auto wallet.

Expense History and Spending/Depositing Money:

To see the expense history for a wallet or spend money, just click on the name of the wallet. This will take you to the Expenses screen. Here you can see a record of all of your transactions. You can edit the date, comment, currency or amount directly on this screen. If you change the amount of a transaction, the amount remaining and total will automatically be adjusted. If you want to move a transaction to another wallet, click on the transaction and choose details. From the Expense Details screen you can change categories, change accounts, add notes, etc.

You can change wallets from this screen by selecting a different name in the upper-right hand corner. If you want to see a history of all of your transactions from every wallet, you can choose All. You can also click on the bold-face name of the wallet to go directly to the Wallet Overview.

 

If you click you can delete and duplicate transactions as well as editing and purging the wallet. You can also transfer money between wallets.

 

 

 

 

To spend money, just hit New. This will take you to the New Expense screen. Here you can enter a comment and amount. If you tap the Spend button, it will change to Deposit if you want to add money to a wallet.

QB includes a full tax, tip and currency calculator. Just calculate the amount of your portion of the bill and tap Taxand Tip. You can change the percentage of the tax or tip at anytime. The tax and tip calculator should always do what you expect.

One very useful feature of the calculator is the round-up/down buttons. If you round after hitting the Tipbutton, the calculator will automatically show the new percentage of your tip.  You can round the total or the tip by tapping in the field you want to round.

The account list normally contains a predefined list of accounts. However, if you have Quik Budget for QMate installed, this will become a list of QMate accounts. If you choose a QMate account for the transaction, the record will be created in both Quik Budget and QMate.

 

Currency support:

If you click on the currency indicator on the New Expense form, you will be taken to the Currency form. Here you can choose the currency of the transaction as well as create and delete currencies. If you choose a foreign currency, the New Expense form will show both the foreign currency and your home currency. You can use the calculator in either field and QB will automatically calculate the correct amount.

When defining new currencies, you must specify:

1. A country name
2. A currency symbol such as $. This must be unique for each currency.
3. A currency code. Preferably the international currency code for the given currency. QB will use this in the future to allow for updating currencies automatically over the Internet.
4. Specify whether or not the currency uses a decimal.
5. Specify whether or not the currency is locked to the Euro. If a currency is locked to the Euro, its exchange rate will automatically be adjusted if the rate of the Euro is changed.

I have created a few currencies to get you started. If you notice any errors in my definitions, please let me know via email to bug@QuikBudget.com.

 

Filtering (Reports and Sub-Wallets)

Quik Budget supports transaction filtering in two ways. First, you can enter a few letters into the 'Lookup' field. Only records beginning with those letters will be shown. Case is ignored so do not worry about capitalization.

The second way to filter transactions is by clicking on the From checkbox. This enables from and to dates. The default is to show only those transactions in your current pay period but you can click on either the From or To date to change them. Tip: If you set To to a date prior to the From date, the From date will automatically be moved back by an equal amount. If you set From to a date after To, To will automatically be moved forward an equal amount.

Together, these features allow for very flexible reporting. Remember, if you change your wallet to "All", you can see the expenses that meet the criteria your set from every wallet at the same time.

You can also specify a number of Show Options. Show account list causes a popup list to be displayed on the Expenses form. You can use that list to show only transactions from that account. If you show currencies, Quik Budget will add a column to show the currency symbol. With this option off, QB will show the amount of the transaction in your home currency.

If you put a check in Hide transfers, QB will not show transfers between wallets in the expense list. This is very convenient when you want to see how much you really spent.

If you check Hide cleared transactions, QB will not show cleared records. This is useful when you are comparing a wallet to your statements.

Show credits as negative causes credits to wallets to be displayed as negative numbers, i.e. -50.00. With this off, credits are shown in parenthesis, i.e. (50.00).

Show current pay period by default causes Quik Budget to start with the From checkbox on and the current pay period selected as the date range. This improves performance if you have a lot of transactions.

 

 

Expense Details:

If you would like to change the account, mark the record private, protect it from being purged, change the date/time or enter a longer note, hit Details. You can also change wallets and delete records from here. If you move transactions, the money will be credited back to the original wallet or account and debited from the new one. Deleted transactions are credited back to the wallet and account. Note: Currently, account balances may only be tracked with QMate. Any changes you make to a record with a QMate account will be automatically updated in both Quik Budget and QMate.

If the transaction is a transfer between wallets, the Account list will be replaced by a Transfer list. Here you can choose to change the wallet the transfer is with.

 

 

 

Preferences:

You can change the preferences from the Wallets, Expenses or New Expense screens by hitting Menu and choosing Options | Preferences. Here you have the following options:

"Calc" Pass-Thru - Allows you to overload the Calculator button. See below.

Quik entry on launch causes Quik Budget to go directly to the expense entry screen when you start the program.

Use thousands separators - This determines whether tables contain 10000 or 10,000. This can be critical for big number currencies like the Italian Lira.

Show master name - This will display sub-wallets prefixed with the master name, i.e. Dining:Lunch.

Tip on Tax - Most people pay 15% tip on the whole bill. But some pay only on the pretax amount. If you prefer to tip on the full amount, select Tip on Tax.

Max number width. Most people in the U.S. don't need more than 7 characters for number fields. That is big enough for 6 digits and a decimal, i.e. 7000.00. The Italians and Koreans, however, need much more space as their currencies often use 7 or more significant digits. This field will specify how much space to allocate in tables for numbers. Set this as low as you can so that you can see as much of the description fields as possible.

Round by - Specifies how much to round by in the calculator with the round-up and round-down buttons.

Home Currency - Specifies which country you live in. If you change countries, QB will automatically recalculate all of its exchange rates.

 

Purging Old Transactions:

If you would like to purge old transactions without adding the money back into the wallets, just choose purge from either the Wallets or the Expenses page. From the Expenses page you can purge a single wallet. From the Wallets page you can purge all wallets. You can choose to purge records that are over 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months or 4 months old.

If you would like to protect any transactions from purging, you can click on and select Never Purge.

 

 

Transferring Money Between Wallets:

If you click from the Wallets form, you can choose Transfer. This will allow you to transfer money between two wallets. Quik Budget will keep create a To transaction in one wallet and a From transaction in the other. These two transactions will always be kept in sync. If you change the date, amount or details in one, the change will be made to both.

 

 

 

Security:

From the Options menu, you can choose Security to change Quik Budget's password options. Normally Quik Budget uses the system's "Hide/Show private records" state. Using the security options, it is possible to Show or Hide private wallets and transactions locally to Quik Budget. NOTE: If your system setting is "Hide" and you choose to unhide from the security options, private records will be unhidden for this execution of QB only.

You can also specify that you would like a password to be required everytime you run Quik Budget. Since you may want to go in and out of QB quickly, you can also specify that a password is only required if you have been away from Quik Budget for a certain number of minutes, hours or days. You can do the same for hiding private records.

 

Tracking fuel usage:

One of the Wallet personalities needs comment. Quik Budget can now track your gas mileage. Simply edit the wallet details for the wallet you use to track gasoline purchases and select the Fuel personality. Now when you enter transactions in that wallet, Quik Budget displays a screen like the one shown to the left. You can track up to 15 cars. When you get gas, just enter your odometer reading, the amount of gas, the price and any miscellaneous charges such as car wash or a 25 cent ATM card fee.

When you choose , Quik Budget will ask if you filled the tank. If you did, it will calculate the gas mileage. Otherwise, it will remember how much gas you put in so that it can accurately calculate the gas mileage next time you fill up. Quik Budget will automatically remember the last 4 prices and miscellaneous expenses.

If you don't remember to record the odometer reading, just hit without changing the Meter field. In this case, Quik Budget will not record the odometer reading and will wait to calculate gas mileage until you both change the meter field and fill the tank.

To see the fuel statistics for a transaction, just open the details for the transaction and click on the Car button.

 

GoType Keyboard Support:

Quik Budget has excellent support for the GoType Keyboard from Landware. On the Wallet Overview and New Expense forms, you can use the Up/Down arrow keys and the Tab key to navigate between fields. You can also use the keyboard for doing calculations on the New Expense form. Use * for multiply, / for divide, etc. Use ` for Tax and ~ for Tip.

On the Wallets form, you can use the Up/Down arrow keys to choose a wallet. Tab switches between the Amount and Remaining fields. Enter will take you to the Expenses form for the selected wallet.

 

 

Export to CSV (Excel) in Windows:

Quik Budget comes with a program called QB2Excel. It can be downloaded from http://www.QuikBudget.com/QB2Excel.zip. To use this program, simply extract the files to a directory and double click on the .exe file.

Select Export to simply create the file or Export and Load to create it and attempt to load it into Excel. This will only work if Excel is in your path.

The exporter creates a text file with a CSV extension. These may be loaded into virtually any spreadsheet as well as text editors, word processors, etc.

 

 

 

Backup Conduit:

Quik Budget does automatic backups of your data to your PC using the Backup Conduit. The files are typically saved in C:\Palm\<username>\ExpensesDB and CategoryDB. This will soon be replaced with a full PC-side conduit which will allow you to create transactions on your PC or PalmPilot.

 

What is the "Calculator Pass-thru"?

The most convenient way to access Quik Budget is to use the Calculator button for both Quik Budget and the built-in calculator (or app of your choice.)

From Quik Budget, click and choose Options | Preferences. Check the box next to "Calc" Button. If you want to use a different calculator from the default, choose it from the list.

Now when you hit the Calculator button, Quik Budget will start. If you hit it again, the calculator or app of your choice will start.

 

 

How do I register?

If you have received a registration code for Quik Budget, start the program, click and choose Options | Register. In the space provided, enter your registration code. If you would like to purchase Quik Budget but do not know your user name, you can find it here. Be sure to specify the exact spelling including case.

 

 

 

 

 

Using Quik Budget with account managers

Quik Budget now has direct support for Accounts and Loans by John Leung, QMate by Steve Dakin, Ultrasoft Money by Ultrasoft and MAM by Max Edelman and Alex Choukhman.

Accounts and Loans is the only account manager that has direct support for Quik Budget. If you use Acc-N-Loan 2.0 or higher and install the special version of Quik Budget.PRC in the Acc-N-Loan directory, you will be able to use Acc-N-Loan to manage your accounts while Quik Budget manages your wallets. ANL combines a simple user interface with loan tracking, account management and regular (scheduled) transactions. If you create a transaction in ANL and choose a category with a matching wallet in QB, ANL will automatically create the record in QB. You will notice that the title on the Wallets screen also shows ANL. If you click on the word ANL, you will be taken directly into the program.

QMate is a very well established and popular account manager for the Palm Computing platform. It includes a very nice PC and Mac conduit for syncing with Quicken and MS Money. If you use QMate 1.5 and install the special version of Quik Budget.PRC in the QMate directory, you will be able to use QMate to manage your accounts while Quik Budget manages your wallets. You will notice that the title on the Wallets screen also shows QMate. If you click on the word QMate, you will be taken directly into the program.

Ultrasoft Money includes a conduit so that you can directly synchronize with Microsoft Money and is a full-featured account manager. If you use Ultrasoft Money 1.2 or higher and install the special version of Quik Budget for Ultrasoft Money.PRC in the Money directory, you will be able to use Ultrasoft Money to manage your accounts while Quik Budget manages your wallets. You will notice that the title on the Wallets screen also shows Money. If you click on the word Money, you will be taken directly into the program.

MAM is also very popular and comes has numerous add-on modules. If you use MAMEasy or MAMPro 2.0 or higher and install the special version of Quik Budget.PRC in the MAM directory, you will be able to use MAM to manage your accounts while Quik Budget manages your wallets. You will notice that the title on the Wallets screen also shows MAM. If you click on the word MAM, you will be taken directly into the program.

This is a very powerful combination. For example, if you go to the grocery store and use your Citibank MasterCard to buy a few things, you can spend the money from your groceries wallet and choose Citibank Mastercard as the account. Quik Budget will create the transaction in both programs and adjust the balance in both as well. If you later change the amount, comment, note, etc. from Quik Budget, the matching transaction in your account manager will also be changed. Note: Currently, this is one-way only. If you change the transaction from your account manager, Quik Budget will not be updated. The authors of all three programs are looking into adding direct Quik Budget support in the future.

Hopefully this will be the first of many collaborations such as this on the Palm Computing platform. Please let us know what you think.

 

Crystal Ball

I am perfectly happy to take new feature requests from users. In fact, that is the primary reason that Quik Budget has matured so quickly. Just send me email at Comment@QuikBudget.com. I am currently planning the following improvements:

Why did I write Quik Budget?

Last year my wife and I decided to buy a house. We found a new one that was due to finish building 6-months down the road. We did the numbers and realized that if we stuck to a pretty strict budget and maybe sold one car, we would be able to save the down-payment in the time remaining. At first we used the Quicken credit card for virtually everything so we could try to track the budget in Quicken but this was not a satisfying solution.

Finally I wrote a prototype of QB in Satellite Forms. By the end of the 6 months, we had saved so much money that, not only did we have enough for the down-payment, but we were able to pay off the car that we had thought we were going to need to sell.

I knew I was on to something so I started over in C++ and spent 4 months writing Quik Budget 1.0. The response has been fantastic. It has been really great getting email from so many people who have found Quik Budget as useful as I do. And, of course, many of you have had some great ideas that have resulted in Quik Budget maturing very quickly.  Keep the ideas coming.

Now that we have a house (thanks to being able to save money with QB), my wife wants a backyard (she doesn't like the clay field that was included in the house.) Which leads us to...

How much does it cost?

The better question is how much does it save. So that you can find out for yourself, we have made QB free for the first 100 transactions. After that, it is only $19.95 to register. You can do this online at either PalmGear HQ or PalmCentral. Or you can order by mail by sending a check in U.S. funds to:

Scott Maxwell
3129 Plum Tree Lane
Escondido, CA 92027

So please, give it a try and see for yourself how quickly you save $19.

Thanks for trying Quik Budget.

You can always find the latest versions of Quik Budget at http://www.QuikBudget.com. If you like, you can go directly to the download page at http://www.QuikBudget.com/Download.html.