Keeping track of your finances has become a more and more time-consuming task. A part of your monthly income pays for the basic expenses: food, housing and transportation, but do you have control over the money that's left after the usual expenses? In order to limit your spending and to have a permanently updated budget situation, you need a software application like Snowmint Creative Solutions' Budget. Budget was especially designed to help you in the management and continuous monitoring of your finances.

A basic budget plan is calculating how much income you will have in a month, how much money you will spend and how much money you will have left at the end of the month. Knowing all these things will prevent you from realizing that you can't afford some already purchased items or that you overspent on eating out or traveling.

Budget uses the Envelope Model to help you to efficiently manage your finances. This is a well-known method of distributing your money, by placing the necessary amount for every expense category in a different envelope. The Envelope Model has been proven to be a very effective method to ensure one's financial stability. Budget creates virtual envelopes for all your expenses and permanently displays their balances, keeping you informed at all times.

As an account manager, Budget allows you to view your checkings or savings account's situation, record transactions, print checks, view your account history and balance your checkbook every month.

Budget has a very easy to use Budget Setup wizard, that allows you to configure your bank accounts, the income that you receive and the monthly bills. For every bank account that you create, after choosing the account type (Checkings or savings, Credit card), you can specify a name and the current balance of the account. The next step is to create the bill envelopes; based on your expenses categories, you can choose from a wide range of common envelopes provided by the application or create custom ones. You can assign each expense envelope to one or more bank accounts setting the amount of money to be extracted from each. You can also setup every income source by selecting the amount of money, the pay frequency and the bank account in which it is deposited.

In the main window of Budget you will always see the accounts you created, the envelopes with your bills and the application's toolbar that gives you quick access to the most important features, including Save document, Write check, Deposit, Pay and Account Information.

The Accounts menu provides several actions that you can perform to customize your bank accounts and also setup the printed check appearance. Budget will also balance your account by calculating the total deposits and check.

Budget displays a significant amount of information about your bill envelopes and will also allow you to customize various aspects of them: you can assign an icon specific to the expense category it represents, you can view and edit the pay sources and attach a note to the envelope. Also, you can easily transfer money from an envelope to another and from a bank account to another by using drag & drop, envelopes will spring open and a new window allows you to specify the transaction details.

In the Transactions menu, you can find the usual transaction types: Check, Debit, ATM Withdrawal, Deposit, Transfer and Charge. Each of these menu items will open a new window, in which you can record the amount of money, their destination, a memo to provide details about the payment and the option to remind and print the transaction. Budget also offers a Remind feature that will show a reminder about the transaction at a chosen date.

The Good

Budget for Windows is very easy to use, has an intuitive interface and it can prove to be a really useful application for people who have trouble managing their budget.

Budget provides a very well-documented help file that explains the basic financial concepts and every step in using the application.

The Bad

If you open an internal window without closing it, that window will remain in the background of the application, making it hard to access. To close it afterwards, you have to minimize Budget's main window and this way view the opened windows left behind.

The Truth

To use Budget, you need minimal knowledge about managing finances to appropriately configure your accounts and checkbooks. Even if you don't possess this type of knowledge, you can learn the basic concepts and rules to use Budget by reading its help file.

Although it is supposed to help you save money, Budget is not exactly cheap as it will take $29.95 out of your pockets. The demo version can be used as a temporary solution, since it has multiple disabled features and it can only record 250 transactions. Also, you can only balance each bank account 4 times and the reports and printed checks have 'Unregistered' watermarks.