pageamonth blog

plan ahead to get ahead

March is a good time for budget adjustments

Mar 1

Posted by nbk in budgeting | Comments off

If you have been tracking your 2010 Pageamonth budget for a couple of months this year, you probably are getting used to how it works by now and how it can help track your income and expenses as they occur.  You are also aware no doubt that there have been some surprises–expenses you couldn’t have anticipated, unexpected breaks in an electric bill being lower than you budgeted for perhaps, or unexpectedly high charges for a changed phone fee, etc. 

Many vendors use a new year or a new month to change their charges, their reporting, their services and so forth.  Some are forced to by new laws, as in the case of new credit card regulations enacted just this year.  Others simply use the new calendar to institute rate or fee changes they feel are needed.

But my point is that the budget projections you set up earlier have probably been changed even within January and February, and you can see now, looking back at your actual income and expenses, how your projections for the rest of 2010 have already been affected throughout your spreadsheet.  Your projected year’s end balance has changed, probably, and it may look more acceptable or unacceptable to you.

If your budget needs adjusting to meet your goals, March is a good time to do it.  You’re probably getting your taxes ready and finding good or bad news there, so see it as an opportunity to plan for the future, to recode your categories if need be, to assign income and expenses where they are most suitable and useful for future totals you will need next year at this time.  (Remember that all category totals appear in real time on your Pagemonth spreadsheet’s totals page to the right of January’s workspace, the summary page.  But they also appear as annual totals by category number on each month’s page in the center columns, so you don’t need to keep flipping over to the summary page while you’re working unless you wish to study the larger grouping.) 

Just remember that having a budget plan doesn’t mean you can stop keeping track and making changes to that plan.  It’s a tool, not a solution you can file away and forget about, and you need to use your budget regularly and keep it well maintained for it to be useful.

a few tips for new users

Jan 15

Posted by nbk in budgeting, setup and use | Comments off

It’s two weeks into the new budget year, and you may be adjusting your new 2010 budgets based on a couple of weeks of bills and income actually transacted.  Our setup and help pages usually answer many new setup questions, but a few points and suggestions may be helpful to repeat here, as you gain experience working with the Pageamonth spreadsheets.

First, remember that nothing is locked in.  Every cell in your spreadsheeet is yours to configure as you need to.  If, in the cash flow (left) side of dated transactions, for instance, you’re finding you need to change the dates from the way they’re distributed through January so that you can pay more bills on the 15th or 5th or 31st, grab the rows from the adjacent days that you need and redate them, by all means.  No formulas are affected by dates or descriptions.  We’ve set up a distribution of the available rows into weeks and days that should work for many of you, but you can redo it to suit your needs and preference.   Just be sure you enter the right operator (plus or minus sign) in the formula (column D) that adds income to your balance or deducts expenses for each item, especially if you’re changing dates when something needs to be altered, as when a paycheck gets deposited on a day after you planned, or a bill gets paid on a different day.  Since the balance doesn’t reveal the formula normally to your attention, it’s easy not to use the right operator.  When you do inadvertantly use the plus sign instead of the minus one or vice versa, your twin end balances will disagree and draw your attention.  Remember, your spreadsheet cash flow side, once you set up your budget, is a plan for getting and spending amounts through the month, but you will frequently change it as the amounts, dates, or items change to real transactions, not budgeted ones, and you should be fine if you enter the corrected amounts in the budget side at the same time.

As for the budgeted amounts themselves, we prefer to estimate income a bit lower and expenses a bit higher than we perhaps expect them to be.  It takes some sting out of the billpaying if our phone bill is $53 though we actually budgeted $60 for it, or makes us happy if our paycheck deposit is a bit better than we budgeted in.  If you are upset by budgeted amounts that you find get way off from actual amounts you get and spend, try changing the budgeted amounts in those categories to be closer to real ones.  But if you are really a stickler for accuracy in budgeted amounts, try to remember no budget is ever unchanged, because the future isn’t completely predictable and you can’t control what others pay and charge you exactly each month.  but real amounts should approximate budgeted amounts in most cases.  If they do not, see what you might do to bring them into line.  It’s not alwaoys possible, but it often is, if you study your situation and goals.

One of the tricks I learned a long time ago is to not only budget expenses high and income low, but build in some buffers.  The single intergrated spreadsheet file budget is an ideal place to try things out and see how they may affect your end balance through all twelve  months (which you can see on every monthpage near the bottom of columns  E and F).  A buffer to pay for credit card charges is especially needed, since you don’t budget for them as actual purchases, usually, until you charge them, but don’t pay for them until one to three months later.  You will need to pay, though, and it’s far best to pay them off as soon as possible to avoid interest. 

If you have credit statements from the previous year, find out how much on average you normally charge and budget an amount to pay it.  If it’s the month after Christmas shopping or after a vacation trip, budget even more in, say, January and August, for the card issuers you use the most.  Remember, you’re just setting aside funds to pay what you have reason to believe you’ll need to pay.  If it turns out you don’t need so much, you can reduce your buffer.  But I like to budget plenty just in case, and see what it does to my end of month balance projections, if it will leave me with a healthy balance to pay the rest of what I anticipate I’ll need to.   Budgeting is psychological, and it’s better to believe you need to be a bit careful than to believe you’re more flush than you are.  Keep your eye on the balances as you get and spend through this year.  Estimate income low and expenses high, don’t ignore anything you can think of that for sure you’ll need to adjust for,  realize that sometimes you’ll have unexpected costs that come out of nowhere and knock you off balance, but that they are usually rare and you can recover from perhaps with some further adjustments, rather quickly, and you’ll be surprised how much our spreadsheets can help you manage through the year. 

Best of luck to all who have begun their Pageamonth budgeting for 2010.  If you have not and would like to try, you can download our free spreadsheets all you wish at our website and catch up easily.

Budgeting for 2010 easiest now, and why

Dec 30

Posted by nbk in setup and use | Comments off

Pageamonth budgets (and perhaps most 12-month personal budgets) are easiest to set up late in the year prior to the one you’re setting up for, currently 2010, only a day from now!

This is because Pageamonth budgets are set to calculate everything from January through December of any given year.  This “Calendar Year” provides our budgets’ natural or conventional timeframe, matching most tax year periods and other uses.  It also means that if you input your expected income and expenses now, you can begin to track and adjust them into actual transactions as you get and spend amounts from January 1 on which you record in your checking account register, without having to record the early new year transactions by backtracking and entering perhaps several months’ experience just to catch up in, say, April or May or later.

Contrary to some assumptions, there is no “right time” to begin a budget, but if you set up for next year now, or as soon as you can conveniently in January, you’ll be ahead in time spent and experience using your budget.  If you don’t get going on it till later, don’t worry.  You can copy your transactions from your check register and catch up at any time to see how your budgeted amounts are playing out and what may need adjusting.

Remember, a budget is made to manage your personal funds.  It is not set in stone and needs to be altered by your experience throughout the year.  By projecting your income and expenses you think will be gotten and spent, you create your budget.  But there’s nothing “real” about it whatsoever, since no one can predict future income and costs, emergencies, job changes, losses, gains, etc. with certainty.  It becomes “real” only with the passing of each day, week,  and month as you change projected amounts to actual amounts. 

As 2010 passes the days, Pageamonth budgets don’t keep your original budgeted amounts or compare them to actual amounts to show you how you succeed or fail to meet your goals and expectations.  Our spreadsheets simply keep an accurate record of what you earned and spent, how much you have in your checking account at any given moment, what you anticipate earning and spending in the future, and what you will have left in your checking account each day throughout the year if nothing changes.  But of course, it will, and will need to be adjusted regularly.  It is a plan which you alter and change continuously.  We feel that knowing what’s true at any given time and what is likely coming is the best reason to plan your decisions.  It’s not helpful to agonize over past decisions that fell short or unwise purchases.   It is helpful to keep a record of them, however, which you will have for review and planning, and it should match your check register exactly.

But the benefit of having the future continually planned out is in being able to see what you will have on any day till 2011, a year from now, if your plan is reasonably realistic.  You will know when things will be better and when they may get tight and difficult to get through, and being able to see these coming is the real benefit of budgeting.

We hope you have a Happy New Year and whatever your fortunes bring, that you will use our budgets–or any others you prefer–to help you “plan ahead.  And again, we encourage you to email us with any thoughts, comments, suggestions, questions or concerns you may have about our spreadsheets or services.

who can benefit most from our budget

Dec 6

Posted by nbk in Uncategorized, budgeting | Comments off

As I reviewed stats and pages, ads and descriptions, I realized how confusing it must be to find a budget program or spreadsheet that can work best for any given person or household, out of the thousands available, and it’s understandable since people look for budgeting assistance for such a varied spectrum of needs.

Some want to plan a wedding, vacation,  or other specific event and realize they need a specific kind of worksheet to do it that will establish a fixed maximum and identify what costs they need to calculate.  Such budgets aren’t really suitable for Pageamonth budget spreadsheets, which are designed for ongoing use over time, through the year.  There’s no income pattern in such special needs plans, for example, just a ballpark total to work with.  People need to find a wedding software or worksheet and would benefit from many available online.

The same is true for construction budgets and other project management budgets.  Although a free Pageamonth is always available for download, stripping and changing of formulas for specific needs if managers want to try it, they are undoubtedly better served by either designing their own worksheets from scratch or turning to many available online.

Business use of pageamonth budgets is sometimes a good option if the business is fairly straightforward and simple, such as sole proprietorships and online ventures, ebay trading, and so forth.  Although Pageamonths aren’t robust enough to handle employee accounting and tax regulations, they can be configured to kep track of revenues and expenses and develop totals in various categories which can then be used in other business.software.   Pageamonth spreadsheets have a number of advantages for simple business use, including the fact that they are set up for not only budgeting but fulfilling the amounts over time, revising and balancing by means of the twin entry system in category and in time.  Furthermore, since they exist as a unified twelve-month spreadsheet which can be configured to begin and end in any fiscal year, and since all cells including all formulas are user-configurable, Pageamonth budget files can adapt to existing categories and needs.   We don’t recommend them, however,  for more complex business accounting, but they do exist offline for a variety of resident business needs such as sub-accounts and private accounts or other use on a resident desktop workstation.  Their benefits are privacy, cross-checking, simplicity, configurability, and small size, which makes them easily emailable and sharable.  They should not be viewed as a primary business accounting software system.

The prime purpose of Pageamonth budget spreadsheets is for personal, family, and home budget setup and tracking the checking account transactions of a typical small family, with one or two wageearners whose jobs are reasonably established and predictable with regular year-round employers.  In other words, what used to be called normal or traditional needs.  These days, of course, income and spending may come from any number of sources and fluctuate widely, even in traditional families.  But such individuals or households, who may or may not have dependents or children’s needs, who own or rent their housing, have regular patterns of spending and earning, and can effectively keep track of their present, past, and future needs with Pageamonth’s free spreadsheets.

Our budgets aren’t useful for investments tracking or equity work, but they can be adapted to keep track of limited transactions, especially as they affect checking balances as income or expense instruments on a regular basis.  Since we do not build in any tax-pertinent factors to our budgets, their use is, again, limited to simple calculations to arrive at totals which can assist in providing entries for more robust software such as Turbotax.  They can provide a detailed record, however, of individual transactions through the year for backtracking, similar to checking account statements.

Many users today prefer to use more graphic budgets and simplified budget calculators, especially singles and younger generations, on their cellphones.  Pageamonth is not useful for them.  Neither is it useful for anyone who wants to be praised or scolded for their spending habits by colorful green/red graphs or charts.  Pageamonth is simply a non-judgemental plan of budgeted amounts and totals, which the user revises into a record of actual amounts and totals through each day, month, and year.   It helps anyone who wants to know where he or she stands with their personal money, how they got there, and what needs seem to be coming down the road.  It helps people who prefer to plan ahead, and probably is just an annoyance to people who prefer not to.

Why I Prefer Pageamonth, by the author

Dec 2

Posted by nbk in Uncategorized | Comments off

You won’t get rich using our Pageamonth Budget, but you may well hang on to  more of what you have.  It’s probably because in using it every day it keeps your attention on what’s coming and causes you to adjust your habits accordingly.  And as we say on our homepage, “knowing–that’s what makes  budgets work.”

I went budget-browsing today and found hundreds if not thousands of them, from simple worksheets to highly elaborate programs, free and for sale, online and standalone.  It’s probably one of the most prevalent software commodities available.  And most of them are attractive and efficient.  Some are very ingenious.  Most are far more sophisticated than my simple spreadsheets.

Yet I still prefer Pageamonth to all the others.  It made me question why, though.  Maybe because I understand my own spreadsheet best because I created it and have used it to manage our family finances for decades.  I made the pre-Windows budget categories in DOS on an old Tandy TRS=80, and kept my budget on handhelds and Atari’s and Commadores and other “antiques” for years, so I’d know where we stood moneywise at all times.  Then I switched it to Windows when 3.1 came out.  I prefer my spreadsheet it because it’s always given me the peace of mind of knowing what’s coming and giving me the time and a way to adjust to it–a way to plan and to revise the plan so I don’t have to worry about money all the time.  I’ve been there, and it’s not a good place to be.

I suppose many of the other budgets do too, but I don’t sense the same clarity with them as with my own.  I never understood how telling me how over or under a target amount or category I was, was supposed to help me.  Things come up.  Cars break down and unexpected expenses happen, and to me it’s just silly to set up a perfect budget plan and stick to it no matter what.  I never could, not with a growing family and on a teaching income.  I found it counterproductive and too disappointing to set artificial percents and targets I couldn’t meet and then whip myself when I didn’t, so I gave that up.  I don’t find guilt trips change anything; they just cause pointless blame and resentment.  My pie charts and bar graphs went out with the TRS-80, and I started making budgets based on our actual earning and spending alone.  My goal became to see what lay ahead, not how badly I messed up.

I quickly found out that I needed two things in view at once, at all times:  the budget I made, to show me how much I was spending on each category of cost and total the incomes and expenses  up at the end of the year, and a dated cashflow to show me what it was doing to my checking account as I did the actual transactions–deposited my pay and wrote the checks. 

That meant of course that the budget I so carefully projected for the year was actually made of silly putty and needed to be changed all the time: not just for future amounts but during each day, often.  When I wrote a check for a different amount than I budgeted, I had to not only correct the amount on the cash flow side, where I had projected one amount but paid another, but I had to correct it on the budget side also, so the twin balances at the end of each month would always agree.  I came to see this as vital to giving me an accurate balance that matched my checkbook balance at all times, but also made me look ahead at what I’d budgeted and planned to spend at certain dates in cash flow for that expense in the future months, and adjust those amounts accordingly if needed.

And I made sure I kept my running current and projected balance in my view through each month’s dates, made printouts that would give me a monthly health checkup, and realized that I still didn’t have all I needed to know in view.

I still needed to know what not only the current and past months’ balances were, adjusted for all my transactions as I went, but what the future months’ balances would be–without leaving the workspace page– if I didn’t change anything further, and what I’d end up with at the end of the year.  So I added those amounts in the totals center of each page, and a year gain/loss amount in the r h corner I could keep an eye on.  But getting this data in one page per month was challenging, especially since I was committed to printing it on a notebook size page I could review offline.  (Setting up the printing probably proved more challenging than setting up the editing window, especially with the old dot matrix printers.) 

It’s much easier now, with laser printers and no load times and easy editing that allows what used to be a spreadsheet to be framed by the “moving window” workspace I devised, 21 rows deep, three clicks to get to the same cell position in the next month.  I prefer my spreadsheet to all others because I never lose my data.  It’s right where I put it, and I can easily scroll to it with the “moving window” down through the two-dimensions of my spreadsheet.

I think the problem I always have with form entry budgets is that they are in effect three-dimensional, not two.  I stack my months in vertical consecutively numbered rows, and prefer to think about my spreadsheet as a scroll of months laid out with  end to end.  With form entry budgets I seem to have a stack of pages atop one another, usually different in form one page to another.  I don’t know how to find or correct my data nearly as conveniently as I do in my own spreadsheet.

I added sections for credit purchases and cash accounting procedures as I went, but none of them are mysterious or unclear to me, and I left all my cells open, including the formulas I worked out. I designed my own budget spreadsheet the way I wanted it, in other words, because I couldn’t find any other I could figure out as well, and it worked for me for many years and still does.

I didn’t call my spreadsheet budget Pageamonth till last April when I started the Pageamonth.com website, and I didn’t make it free to all until late August.  I’m glad I did.  My adsense revenue has never completely paid for my adwords costs or hosting fees, but I’ve kept them low enough I’m hopeful I may break even by April, the site’s anniversary.  Since we went to free products and services we’ve had over a thousand downloads and several thousand visits.  It’s very rewarding.   I hope it serves your needs as well as it has mine.  –N.B. Kauffman, Pageamonth Author.

what are disposable funds?

Nov 21

Posted by nbk in pageamonth features | Comments off

We get asked about our use of the term “disposable funds” in our spreadsheets more than any other query.  We’ve even been asked by financial professionals, who don’t wish to appear unfamiliar with it. 

It’s  a small wonder no one seems to know what “disposable funds” are, because it’s a term I more or less coined, I think, and there’s probably a more established accounting term which professionals use to describe this very common amount.  In brief, it means this:

Disposable Funds are the total amounts of money one had at his disposal (in other words, in his checking account) through a given month.   It consists of any balance  brought forward from the previous month plus any income amounts deposited through the current month.

From the Disposable Funds, then, we need to subtract the Total Expenses of the current month which were paid out of the account, to arrive at the exact same End Balance remaining in the End Balance as shown on the Cash Flow side.

Why are “Disposable Funds” a useful (if not necessary) term?  To distinguish them from total income, which would perhaps not include balance brought forward, rebates, or other possible revenues.  And to dispel possibly misleading the user.

Suppose one had a normal income month but a really high round of expenses.  If we subtract total expenses from total income it could show a negative balance.  But if we include the amount we carryover from the previous month, as we do before beginning our daily cash flow transactions, it will give us a more comparable picture of our situation on the budget side, and possibly less alarming.   The budget side, unlike the cash flow side, has no running balance to take note of through the month and help us decide when to spend.  It has only the end balance.

So the Disposable Funds offers a kind of psychological equivalance to the budget side which is already there on the cash flow side.  It says to the user, “Okay, here’s what you came in with (Beginning Balance), plus what you’ll add to it (Total Income).  From now on, we’re taking out of it for costs (Total Expenses).  How much will be left afterwards?  End Balance.” 

I probably would have not bothered to sum the amounts before taking out the expenses had I not set up the two, twin balances, and had I not treated the cash flow side as a running checking account balance, which forced me to include amounts brought forward from the previous month before totalling the first transaction of the current month.  But to arrive at the same end balance on the budget side as the end balance on the cash flow side, it was necessary to subtract my total expenses not from my total income alone, but from my total income plus balance carried forward.

That the issue even comes up points to the fact that Pageamonth budgets are not standalone, month to month plans, but one integrated twelve-month product, for use throughout the year.  It begins with an amount you enter from December 31 of the previous year and adds to and subtracts from that amount througout the following 365 days.  So your “Disposable Funds” are established at the beginning of your budget, and hopefully they will be even more at the beginning of the following year.

“We’re not [just] in Kansas anymore.”

Nov 17

Posted by nbk in plans and changes | Comments off

We began Pageamonth.com last May as a sales and support site for our spreadsheet budget only.  But when we changed from sales revenue to ad revenue to defray our costs, we began running ads for our competitors on our pages.  And why not?  we were giving away our budgets free, so there was no conflict or loss of revenue.  In fact, as most visitors realize, we actually got a few cents when visitors clicked on other products’ ads on our site (and still do).

So we not only permitted our competitors’ ads to run on our pages but encouraged it.  It gave our visitors more choices than the few budgeting products we could offer, and gave us some small revenue to help defray our costs.  Ironically, we made money only when a visitor left our site!  Not when they came, not when they downloaded our free spreadsheets, and not when they perused our pages.  Our only revenue, occurs when our visitors leave us to look further elsewhere.

This presents a challenge in both our own ads, since most ads promote the host product rather than others, and in the slant of others’ ads we permit to run on our site.    Should we run ads to promote our product? or to promote others’ products?   Ads we run invite the searcher to visit our site, of course, but if they do, it actually costs us money.  (We pay Adwords only when someone clicks on our ads, like other sites do.  Adsense pays us, on the other hand, when, not finding what they want on our site, a visitor clicks on another ad on our site, and leaves us.

So what happens when we slant our ads for something we, a home budget, don’t offer–say, , business budgeting or investment software products?  Visitors expecting to find business budgets or investment software-on our site will quickly leave when they don’t find it.  But since that’s included in our text content, Google places text and image ads for such software on our site; therefore our visitors may well click on such ads to exit, and we get our only revenue! 

It’s a convoluted system, but it seems to work to everyone’s advantage.  Google gets our daily budget amount, we get to build our brand by leapfrogging hundreds of other free budget sites in visitor searches, the visitor gets a free, very effective home budgeting spreadsheet system and pays nothing whether or not he uses it or goes on to other products, other advertisers get the chance to attract our visitors to their sites, and the visitor gets to peruse many personal and business budget products free of any charge, and land on budget products or services he’s after.

What can go wrong?  Well, suppose we slant our ads to deliberately lure the professional accounting software searcher to our site.  We don’t sell any such products, nor are affiliated with any.  But we do advertise them on our pages once the visitor checks out our products. 

We consider this to be misleading, though it’s legal.  The same applies to our using very popular keywords and phrases to trigger short-lived visits that are likely to end in revenue for us when visitors come looking for other products or services, such as “budget calculators,” “budget worksheets,” and others, and leave us by clicking on our competitors’ ads.    Our free spreadsheets do serve these functions to an extent, but they probably aren’t exactly what such searchers are looking for. 

That’s why we strive to be scrupulously clear in our own ads and focus them on our spreadsheets.   We offer free, simple personal and home budget spreadsheets.  We also offer  links to other types of budgeting products through our Budget Links menu page, and other budgeting-related ads on our pages, and we invite many advertisers, even when they contradict each other or when we strenuously disagree with their messages.

On our popular Budgeting 101 page, for example, we notice ads to get a payday loan fast, and another not to take a payday loan at all!  On other pages we see ads for bank services and check printing, business and financial accounting software, get money fast, get out of debt fast, get rich slowly, etc.  It seems everyone has budgeting advice for the hapless individual struggling to keep his or her head above water.

Pageamonth, however, remains committed to the simple budgeting spreadsheets we began with, and to budgeting advice for the individual and household budget user.  We’re glad to include a variety of other products and services, but hope our visitors understand our core commitment is to help them get ahead in their financial success and keeping our products and services entirely free, which sometimes brings surprising ads to our pages.

We must be doing something right, because not only are we growing to over 500 new visits per month and a community of over 800 Pageamonth users out there, we’re attracting ads from such iconic names as Microsoft, Intuit, TD Bank, Allstate insurance, and Google itself! for their budget apps, among many others to our pages from time to time!   We hope we’re earning your trust with our choices, because we want to be around for a long time.

Search Box Added to Budget Links Page

Nov 13

Posted by nbk in plans and changes | Comments off

Please visit our new Budget Links page if you haven’t already.  We’ve established a few good links for personal and business budgeting software already, began budgeting advice sites that don’t sound like the Ten Commandments or a carnival pitchman, and ended with some tips we hope will make budgeting=relevant searches easier.

It seemed only natural then to add a second Google Search box under the search advice for our visitors’ convenience.  The original box remains at the bottom of our homepage.

New Budget Links page added!

Nov 6

Posted by nbk in budgeting, plans and changes | Comments off

We realize searching for budget software that fits our needs and feels right can be like buying a car–a daunting, time-consuming  odyssey with many wrong turns and dead end roads.  Witness the millions of budget links that pop up every time you do a budget-related search.

We thought our free products and services approach at Pageamonth,com should do more than just permit our competitors to advertise on our pages.  The Pageamonth visitor still has to dash off looking at many other sites and products, in hopes of finding  “just what I’m looking for.”   But we also suspect a little help from a disinterested party with nothing to gain wouldn’t be unwelcome at this point in your search.

One way or another your searches brought you to our website, and we’re gratified you’ve  looked at our free spreadsheets and support pages, and decided to look a little further. 

Your problem at this point is, you don’t perhaps have as much time or patience left as when you began to click on every site that calls itself a budget and try to figure what it’s offering, exactly.

If that describes you, we thought you might appreciate a Budget Links tab in our top menu that doesn’t try to sell you anything, of sites we’ve looked over and think are good bets.   Unlike ads on our pages, we get no revenue from your visiting these sites whatsoever,  so we can truly act as a disinterested party in referring them to you.

We have put in a few links already, broken down into personal and business budgeting products, and budgeting advice sites so you don’t waste time on  what you’re not likely looking for.  We’ll try to add to them as we find others, and welcome your suggestions through our contact page.

Let us know if this addition helps you work through “the budget maze. ”

Too Complicated? Too Unclear? Too Many Cells?

Nov 3

Posted by nbk in pageamonth features | Comments off

I don’t know how I could have been so blind as not to notice before:  some folks just don’t like using spreadsheets, period.  I thought everyone used them, thought everyone had them on their computers, thought that since they’ve been around since the earliest days of Windows, everyone was used to using them for all kinds of tasks, just like word processors.  Spreadsheets, Databases, and Word Processors were the three “killer apps” from the beginnings of computing.   I thought everyone knew all about them.

But it’s not true.  I visited a young man recently in New York who works on soundtracks and video game design and uses very sophisticated computer programs professionally, yet he had no spreadsheet program on his own computers!  Not Excel, not MS Works, not any Apple programs, nada.  When I asked him to download and try Pageamonth, he tried to open it and use it online. 

What he got, of course, was a bewildering raw spreadsheet view that wasn’t framed or usable.  Pageamonth files all run on a host program offline, usually in Excel or MS Works.  The files need to be saved to the user’s computer and run with the proper program.   And they are formatted to open with the properly framed workspace for editing, ready to go in January’s window.    What he got instead in his online view was most of January and onto the middle of the Yearend Summary Page, all unframed and uneditable.  I hadn’t considered that someone would select “open” rather than “save”  the file in the popup menu at the beginning of the download, and nowhere does it warn that if you do open the file it opens online, not on your computer, if it opens at all.

I realized I had to get the word out to Pageamonth users not to use the file online, that it had to be downloaded and saved first, and run offline.  So I’ve added that ahead of any download links on Pageamonth.com’s pages.   But that confusion never occurred to me to anticipate, and it pointed up another possible sticking point about our files: they aren’t as familiar or welcome to everyone as they are to those who have used spreadsheet documents regularly.

Another person I know to be a sophisticated computer user doesn’t use Pageamonth either, and thinks it’s too complicated, busy-looking, and confusing.  “All those cells!”  she complains.  Too many cells in a spreadsheet?  Still another user used a search term that caught my attention and baffled me for a moment:  “What’s a spreadsheet?”  he asked.  Another tells me he doesn’t like Pageamonth because he prefers online budgets like Mint–the iphone app, no less. 

Well, I’ve given these responses some thought, and it has helped me understand why Pageamonth budgeting can be confusing and many people prefer easier to use other programs, many of which use forms one enters requested data into blanks then manipulates into report screens of one kind or another.  I’ve tried many of them and found that I prefered to write my own budget many years ago and refined it into Pageamonth Budget files.

I look at it this way.  I like to be able to see my data and know where to find everything and what everything does, laying out my cards all on the table, so to speak.  Spreadsheeting allows me to do that.  Since my entire year’s budget and cash flow is on one single file, I can quickly find any datum or formula, either scrolling through or using a “find” command from the program menus.  And since my budget allows continual updating of my transactions through the year, I can see my earning and spending patterns leading up to the present moment at any time and know how I got there, as well as see my projected earning and spending plans for the rest of the year and where I’m headed.

When I print each month out, I take out the gridlines because I don’t need them to find things visually, so I make that much concession to the anti-cells contingent.  I retain the gridlines in the computer workspace, however, so I can navigate to the right place and make my formulas point to the right reference. 

I’ve learned more about psychology and some flawed assumptions I’ve had, also.  Just because someone uses computers extensively doesn’t mean the person is familiar with all the applications they’re used for–even all the basic ones.  And  since  people are  expected to be “computer literate” today, no one wants to admit that he is not, or finds some uses still unfamiliar and intimidating.

At first glance, Pageamonth spreadsheets probably appear intimidating or complicated, moreso than form budgets, I must admit.  But having written them, I find them simpler, clearer, and easier to use after a little practice, and certainly less mysterious for personal money management than other alternatives.  Even with “all those cells!”