eCommerceNews New Zealand - Technology news for digital commerce decision-makers
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Thu, 1st Jul 2010
FYI, this story is more than a year old

A way to better manage your money.PocketSmith's co-founder sums up the app as a web-based calendar that forecasts your future cash position. On the face of it, the app works like you'd expect any other web-based calendar to, but in this one all the events are financial.

You can enter your scheduled salary, bill payments, rent and grocery bills, and you can make them repeat weekly, fortnightly or monthly.

Aside from being a handy tool around the home, it's also the perfect application for managing a small business, says PocketSmith co-founder, Francois Bondiguel. “It's all about forecasting your future,” he told Start-Up recently.

“Once you've added in all your income and expenses, you can immediately see what's going to happen to your business the next day, the next week, the next month and even the next few years. That allows an owner to start playing with ‘what if' scenarios such as what will happen if a client doesn't pay on time.

PocketSmith's main display is presented as a calendar, as Bondiguel says that a top-to-bottom spreadsheet view of your upcoming financial events is not particularly comfortable to view or use.

A PocketSmith calendar can be connected with Google Calendar, to Outlook or to your iPhone. The Dunedin-based company supports bank transaction files from anywhere in the world, and says that adding transactions manually is easy.

“We've made adding transactions manually quick and painless,” says the company. “With fast web interfaces, transaction addition via Twitter, text message (SMS ) and quick mobile web pages, you can log a transaction and get on with life.” The software is cloud-based, so there's nothing to download, and being web-based means that you'll use the latest version every time you log in. Security measures have also been put in place to give users peace of mind about managing their money online.

“We have strong security practices, use reliable and up-to-date system architectures, and have a wide range of measures in place, which ensures your information is safe and non-identifiable,” Bondiguel added.

There are three levels of plans for the service: free, premium and super. As the site points out, there are no contracts and no long-term commitments, as it's a pay-as-you-go service.