PocketSmith Review: A Personal Finance Software That Plans Your Financial Future

Love it or loathe it, budgeting is an essential part of life. Without an adequate accounting of your income, investments and expenses, it’s impossible to effectively plan for your future or make sound financial choices. We all know budgeting is important, yet many of us find the process confusing, difficult or just plain boring. As a result, a lot of us budget inadequately, or don’t budget at all.

Thankfully, the digital age has brought us many tools to make this process easier. One of those tools is called PocketSmith, a simple, effective, and intuitive budgeting app that will help you take control of your finances and ensure your financial future.

PocketSmith Review

Our PocketSmith review will explain how the software works, outline its main features, and conclude as to whether this budgeting app is right for you.

What is PocketSmith?

PocketSmith a personal finance software and budgeting app, specifically focused on providing users with clear and intuitive ways to visualize their money and expenses. The PocketSmith app consolidates all your accounts in one place, so you can have a full and complete picture of your money. Bank accounts, investment accounts, credit cards, loans, PocketSmith can display all of these in a simple and easy-to-understand way.

Good to Know: A unique feature of PocketSmith that sets it apart from other budgeting apps is its ability to give you a picture of your future finances. The app enables users to do personal finance forecasting, anticipating how your money will grow over time. It also lets you apply “what-if” scenarios to you budget, helping you visualize how immediate changes to your budget will have long-term effects.

Goal: The goal of the app is to present your finances in a way which feels natural and easy to understand. As most of our lives revolve around using calendars, PocketSmith has integrated budget calendars which will help you to make sound financial plans for your future. The goal of PocketSmith is ambitious: to give every user complete control over their finances and financial future. But do they succeed? In our PocketSmith review, we’re going to begin by examining each of the software’s features in detail.

PocketSmith Features

Automatic Live Bank Feeds

Some budgeting software requires you to meticulously enter each charge by hand. Many users find this to be tedious and time-consuming. Thankfully, PocketSmith has an automatic bank feed update feature.

Pro Tip: To use this feature, all you have to do is link your accounts to the app using the software provided. PocketSmith supports checking, savings, credit, loan accounts and more. Once your account is linked, PocketSmith will automatically import activity from this account into the app, saving you the time and tedium of doing it yourself.

Less Known Facts:

• The PocketSmith app allows users to import multiple accounts from the same bank, so it doesn’t matter if several members of your family have separate accounts, they can all be imported together to manage in the app.
• PocketSmith can also auto-categorize most of your transactions, importing them into your budget under meaningful categories to save you even more time.
• The software supports over 10,000 banks in 36 countries, so there is good chance your bank is supported. All major banks in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK are supported.

Find and Organize Transactions

PocketSmith offers a robust suite of tools to organize, categorize and find your transactions. Users have multiple options for importing accounts. They can use the automatic feeds feature. enter account entries manually, or upload entries from third-party sources. When it comes to organizing, in addition to the auto-categorization, users can label and annotate transactions as they see fit.
Pro Tip: The PocketSmith app also features an effective search tool, allowing users to quickly find transactions by filtering for type, label, date, name, and more.

Multi-Currency Functionality

If you have accounts across different countries and in different currencies, you’ll find the multi-currency functionality of PocketSmith to be one of its most useful features. The app allows you to have accounts from different countries side-by-side, with automatic currency conversion based on the day’s rates. What’s more, you decide how to display the accounts and in which currency, giving you the flexibility to view your accounts in the way that makes the most sense to you.

Good to Know: Keep accounts in their native currency, with instant conversions visible by hovering the mouse over them. Alternatively, you can display all accounts in the same base currency, with the conversion automatically carried out by the app. Choose a base currency for your total net worth, so you can easily see how much money you have in a single currency, even with accounts in different currencies. The PocketSmith app even supports exchange rates for Bitcoin, gold and silver.

Personal Finance Forecasting

One of the most powerful functions of PocketSmith is its ability to let you see the future of your finances. The PocketSmith forecasting system doesn’t rely on complicated spreadsheets. It uses an intuitive calendar view to give you a clear picture of your budgeting at a glance.

Attractive visual graphs show you exactly how much your money will grow given your current budget. If you’re a visual person like me, you’ll find these graphs give you the best understand of where your budget is currently, and where it’s headed.

Did You Know? PocketSmith’s personal finance forecasting is so accurate it can tell you exactly how much you’ll have on any given day, up to a period of 30 years in the future. The app also supports interest calculations for your accounts, helping you to visualize how compound interest will grow your money over time.

What-If Scenarios

Life is full of surprises, so it’s important to be able to plan for future events.

One of PocketSmith’s most interesting features is the what-if scenarios. With this functionality, the app lets you plan future events and shows you how these will impact your budget.

• Say there is a large expense coming up soon like a trip or a major purchase. You can create scenarios for these events and see the ramifications of that event on your budget in real-time.
• You can create multiple scenarios and toggle them off or on, seeing how each affects your budget in turn.
• These scenarios will help you to manage risks and make better financial decisions, knowing exactly how they’re going to impact your budget.

Flexible Budgeting

The PocketSmith allows you to breakdown your budgets in any way you want. You can view budgets by year, by month, by day, and more. You can even create custom budget timeframes which fall within whichever specific dates and times you specify. This way, you’re not locked into any specific timeframes. The app adjusts to your budgeting needs, letting you organize the budget in the way that makes the most sense to you.

The Dashboard

The dashboard is the main page of the PocketSmith app, and it’s expertly designed to display all the essential information you need on one screen. At a glance, you can view your active accounts and their balances, your most recent transactions, spending data broken down into categories, current net worth, future forecasts, and alerts and notifications for upcoming transactions.

The dashboard is designed to look great on smartphones and tablets as well as on your computer, so no matter what you’ll have a great looking and functional dashboard. With all your financial information at your fingertips, you’ll be better informed and more able to make the right financial decisions.

Net Worth Statement

The PocketSmith net worth statement provides users with an accurate and comprehensive view of their total net worth. It’s not just a measure of how much cash is in your accounts, it allows also accounts for other valuable assets such as vehicles, properties, investments and more. This screen also displays any outstanding debts you carry, giving you a full picture of your financial situation including what you owe. See your net worth grow over time and track the appreciation of your assets as they increase in value on this screen.

Pricing

PocketSmith comes in several pricing tiers, and our PocketSmith review will help you determine which one is best for you.

There are three pricing tiers: Basic, Premium and Super.

PocketSmith Basic

The basic tier is the simplest service PocketSmith  offers, and it’s completely free.

At the basic tier you can link a maximum of two bank accounts. However, the basic tier doesn’t include the automatic live feed or auto-categorization features mentioned above.

This means with the basic tier you’ll have to enter your transaction information manually or upload third-party statements.

Pro Tip: You can create up to 15 budgets with PocketSmith Basic and enjoy financial forecasting up to six months. This is a great option for users new to budgeting software, or those who want to give the PocketSmith app a try before committing. However, they’ll be missing out on some of PocketSmith’s best features.

PocketSmith Premium

PocketSmith Premium costs $10.95 per month. If you’re interested in experiencing all the features PocketSmith has to offer, this is definitely the best value. With PocketSmith Premium you’ll get to enjoy automatic bank feeds, automatic and manual transaction importing, and automatic transaction categorization.

Did You Know? There is no limit to the number of budgets you can create, and you can link up to 10 different bank, loan, credit or investment accounts. PocketSmith Premium also makes the best use of the app’s personal finance forecasting capabilities, with future projections up to 10 years.

Pro Tip: If you’re serious about budgeting and securing your financial future, PocketSmith premium is for sure the way to go. $10.95 per month is a reasonable value for the number of features provided by this software, and if you purchase one year in advance, you can get an even better rate of $8.25 per month.

PocketSmith Super

PocketSmith Super offers all the same features as PocketSmith Premium, plus no limit on the amount of accounts that can be linked, and 30 years of future projection. It costs $21.95 per month, or $15.58 per month if you purchase a whole year.

Pro Tip: For those who want to do serious long-term budgeting or have more than 10 accounts to link, PocketSmith Super is the ideal choice.

Final Thoughts

Now that our PocketSmith review has covered all the main features and pricing, let’s evaluate the pros and cons of this software.

Pros

• No Contract: PocketSmith requires users to only pay for one month at a time, so you don’t have to worry about being locked into a contract.
• Flexibility: The app is flexible, allowing users to customize their dashboard, currencies, budget dates, transactions categories and more.
• Automatic feeds and categorization: These will save you a lot of time from having to enter this information manually.
• No advertisements: you’ll never be bugged by pesky ads.
• Can import data from banks and other budgeting apps.
• Attractive visual design.

Cons

• Cannot pay bills in-app.
• Free version is basic: need to upgrade to PocketSmith Premium to enjoy the best features.
• A bit of a learning curve: it can take time to get a handle on all the features.

PocketSmith is an excellent budgeting software that will help you to develop a compete view of your finances, and help plan for your financial future. With detailed personal finance forecasting and “what-if” scenarios, you’ll be able to anticipate problems before they arise and make wiser financial decisions.

The transaction categorization system helps users to identify unhealthy spending habits and change their behaviour as soon possible. The fee for PocketSmith Premium is reasonable considering the functionality the software provides and the amount of time it will save you.

If you don’t mind manually entering your transactions, you’ll find the PocketSmith Basic to be one of the best free budgeting apps out there. PocketSmith is a thoughtfully-designed and fully-featured budgeting app that is definitely worth your time to check out.