A PocketSmith Review

PocketSmith is a budgeting and personal finance software tool that allows you to take control of your money. It allows you to take control of your money through forecasting, or showing you what your finances will look like in the future if your current trends continue. With calendars, budgets, pie charts, and graphs, PocketSmith offers a one-stop shop for all your financial tracking needs. But does it deliver?

How PocketSmith Works

When you create an account, you have to pick one of PocketSmith’s three available plans. Their Basic plan is free and features manual imports and limited budgets, accounts, and projection spans. Their Premium plan comes up to $9.95 a month, though the price is only $7.49 per month if you pay annually instead of monthly. This plan makes bank feeds automatic, as well as transaction importing and categorization. It features unlimited budgets and more forgiving limits on accounts and projection spans. Their Super plan comes in at $19.95 a month and $14.16 per month when paid annually, and offers all the Premium features plus unlimited accounts and a larger projection span.

Setting up PocketSmith requires three simple steps: adding bank accounts, categorizing your transactions, and creating your budgets and forecast. Everything is smooth sailing after you complete these time-consuming steps. PocketSmith allows Premium users to connect bank accounts. This sets up an automatic bank feed in your account. PocketSmith also offers manual import of bank files or files from popular apps such as Mint and Quicken.

You can also use PocketSmith without importing sensitive bank files. To do this, you can either enter your transactions manually, or you can use the Forecast Calendar to run your budget with just a basic idea of your income and expenses.

If and when you do have your transactions in the program, you can categorize them. Users with automatic categorization need only set up categories and PocketSmith will categorize in the background. If you do not have automatic categorization, you can create and assign categories for your transactions on the web page and in the mobile app.

Finally, when you have your financial information and transactions uploaded, you can create your budgets and start forecasting. Budgets correlate with your categorized transactions, helping you maintain control of your financial goals.

PocketSmith’s Drawbacks

While PocketSmith has a plethora of features, it also has its drawbacks. In my experience, the biggest drawback was the painful simplicity of the app. When you log into your account with the app – because you cannot set up your account in the app, only on your computer – you can view your accounts, manually categorize transactions, and view your budgets. While these are all essential features, they fail to represent the scope of information you can access via the web. In our smartphone world, it only makes sense to have as many standard features as possible available within the app.

PocketSmith also offers few alerts for account balances and budget limits. Given its close monitoring of your accounts, alerts about such things as unusual spending, or even notifications and reminders from your calendar, would be a smart and useful addition to PocketSmith’s tools.

Is PocketSmith Worth It?

The short answer is probably. Although it is not perfect, the software is unique and offers a variety of features. If you are looking for a good start to balancing your personal finances, PocketSmith’s free plan can help you get started creating and tracking budgets with as little or as much detail as you choose. If you have been balancing your finances and budgeting for a while, but are dissatisfied with your current tools, PocketSmith’s Premium and Super plans may offer the added tools and analysis you need. Regardless, PocketSmith offers a positive user experience and a variety of useful features sure to meet your financial tracking needs.

Cover Photo: Investor Junkie

Additional Screenshots:  PocketSmith Demo Data