To set up your budget within Budget, you create envelopes for your bank accounts and each of your expense categories. Unlike most programs, which use a ledgerlike check-register metaphor, Budget uses a conceptually vivid envelope metaphor, providing the digital equivalent of cashing your paycheck and then distributing the money to different expense envelopes. Of all the programs we looked at, Snowmint Creative Solutions’ Budget 4.3.3 was the most unique. So as good as the program is for people in the earliest stages of saving, it’s not currently capable of expanding to meet growing financial needs. Beginning budgeters don’t usually need to print checks and import bank transactions, but if you’re setting up your first real bank account, being unable to reconcile PigMoney’s account data with your monthly bank statement is a serious problem. PigMoney has no check-printing capabilities, includes no way to balance a checkbook, and, like many of the programs we looked at, made importing financial information we downloaded from a real bank account a frustrating experience. However, this isn’t a problem for finance amateurs with simple budgets. If you have many different expenses, the expense list often ends up disappearing behind the corresponding pie chart. The amount of information in the window can swamp PigMoney’s interface. As you enter each new transaction, a small window displays a list of expense categories sorted by the amount spent below that is a pie chart detailing each of your expenses by category.
PigMoney has an autocomplete feature similar to Quicken’s it remembers items you’ve entered and enters them automatically as you begin to type them again. You create new transactions in PigMoney by clicking on one of the program’s three main transaction buttons - New, Edit, and Delete - and then entering details, such as payment amount, payee, and category, in the transaction window that appears.
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