User Guide

Introduction

Personal Finances is a personal finance manager that enables anyone to manage personal income and expenses with ease. The program will help you control your finances – understand where your money is going, pinpoint the areas of excessive expenditure and cut down unnecessary expenses. It is easy for beginners to get started with, requires no efforts to track finances and offers a wide range of functionality and settings for professional users.

Categories

The concept behind the program lies in grouping expenses and income into categories. This is useful because one can see where money is going and how much is spent at a single glance, without the need to examine reports. The system of categories is designed as a tree that may have the unlimited number of subcategories. Each category may fall into subcategories, each of which may further fall into more sub categories. Additionally, expenses (and income) can be grouped by family members and assigned special tags. This allows the user to see the flow of money in general and then drill down into details.

Transactions

The key notion of the program is a transaction, which stands for any expense, income or transfer of money from one account to another. Transactions are grouped to categories and assigned to an account (or two accounts in case of money transfer from one account to another).

Accounts

An account in the program may represent your real bank account, credit card, cash, pocket money for kids, etc. The program allows creation of the unlimited number of accounts. The user can view transactions associated with a particular account, or all transactions, grouped by categories, tags and family members. It’s possible to set up a budget for any account, which will help the user to control expenses and not exceed the defined limits. Each account must be associated with a currency. The list of currencies is completely customizable – you can edit the list and currency settings, add new currencies and specify the exchange rate.

Some handy features

The program offers several time-saving features.

• The Quick expense feature will help the user enter frequently repeated transactions, without the need to fill in all transaction details into the form again. Just select a preset transaction from the list and edit the values, such as quantity or sum. Other fields are completed automatically.
• Create a copy. Any transaction can be copied and edited (if necessary). Categories can be copied too. When the user attempts to copy a category, the transaction form with the selected category will open.
• AutoFill. With this handy feature, one can get a transaction name filled in automatically. To do so, select the name from the list of names, or key in the first letters and the program will enter an appropriate name automatically.
• Save the date of the last entered transaction. This feature allows the user to easily create several transactions "post factum", without the need to specify the date of every new transaction again and again.