Review of GoodBudget App

In this video, I will review the GoodBudget app and system. This is part of a series where I give my thoughts on a variety of apps for financial budgeting.

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Hi everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I will review the GoodBudget app and system. This is part of a series where I give my thoughts on a variety of apps for financial budgeting.

Goodbudget is a budgeting platform that is available on iOS, android, and through its website. This is another app that does not link with your bank or credit card accounts, so it is manual entry only. That said, it does have an import feature, so you can import a bank file to get started. It has a limited feature set available for free, but offers a paid version for about $7 a month to unlock all of the features.

As I’ve said in other videos, I am partial to apps that automatically link to your accounts and pull in transactions as they occur; however, some people prefer to enter their spending manually. For those who do and don’t mind paying a monthly fee, GoodBudget offers a much fuller feature set the most of its competitors that do not link to financial accounts.

I have some videos that review three of the major budgeting apps (Mint, YNAB, and every budget). For those reviews, I test drove the systems and apps for several weeks. Unfortunately, I did not have time to do that for this round of app reviews, but I’m hoping to give you some insight from a budgeting app veteran, with a long list of picky requirements. Let’s get started.

First of all, I really like that GoodBudget has the ability to access its system through a browser. It is more full featured than its mobile app, but both give good access to its functionality. First, let’s take a look at the website. There are really four areas: envelopes, accounts, transactions, and reports. This is mirrored on its mobile app, but the website has more real estate to show everything all at one time.

Envelopes
GoodBudget is a true envelope budgeting system, which harkens back to the time when people used to put physical cash in physical envelopes for budgeting purposes. I find their design to be easy to understand. The free version gets you 10 envelopes for monthly expenses and 10 in your regular expenses. If you want to upgrade, you can have unlimited envelopes. The process of setting up your envelopes is extremely easy: enter the envelope name and your budgeted amount. In addition, GoodBudget allows you to sort these envelopes manually and it is easy to edit the amounts after you have set everything up. This is the equivalent of labeling your envelope with a name and the amount that you would like to put in it every month. This is different than actually filling the envelope.

GoodBudget does not allow you to assign envelopes to custom groups. Rather, it groups them for you by frequency. In other words, all of the monthly envelopes are sorted together into a group and the others are sorted based on how often you spend/fill the envelope. So on the website this means every six months or annually. On the mobile app, anything other than Monthly is sorted into the irregular category. Although I would rather be able to sort my envelopes into custom groups, I like the ones they have by default.

Accounts
This refers to the actual place where you keep your money - like your checking account or credit cards. In the free version, you are allowed one account. Upgrading gives you unlimited accounts. Goodbudget also allows you to keep track of debt accounts – the free version allows an unlimited number of those, which you have to add through the website.

Transactions
The transaction screen is where you will enter all of your spending, income, and account transfers. As you spend money, you will enter a spending transaction here. This is a pretty straightforward process. GoodBudget has some automatically populated vendors and remembers the ones that you enter. It also seems to have an option to remember the location where you are putting in the track at transaction. So, for example, if you are standing outside of a Dunkin’ Donuts and enter a transaction for the coffee that you purchased, GoodBudget should remember that you previously entered a transaction for Dunkin’ Donuts the next time you are there. The other thing GoodBudget does well is splitting transactions. That way if you have a Costco receipt that contains items both for your household and for groceries, you can allocate that spending to the appropriate envelope. This process is MUCH cleaner than that of other apps and it even does some calculations for you. Entering transactions is by far the most frequent way you will interface with the app, but you will also need to . . .

[yellowcake.]

Although I will continue reviewing manual entry apps....I always look for Marble Jar. I trust the no-nonsense, straight, concise way you deliver the information. Other reviewers seem like they are auditioning for sports announcers or a spokesperson used car commercials. THANK YOU!!!!

[jamesflynn]

Nice review, it looks a bit basic UI wise, but that can be nice in its own way. Thank you for looking at this!

[nancymartinez]

I liked the review, although i just found this app and have a question. There is no way to really add funds to these "Enevople" its just putting in amounts? as if you were really doing it? I am so confused and behind on these types of app. any guidance would be apprecaited.

[MichaelBrummond]

Enjoying your videos! We like putting transactions in manually but would rather it be free haha, any apps that so that?

[georgetteetourneaux]

As I search for a budgeting app for a couple... I am overwhelmed. SIGH

[emilyr]

Have you come across any budgeting apps/programs that allow you to subdivide your account balance into different categories? For example, say I've got $500 saved in case I need to take my pet to the vet. I'd like a way to see veterinary budget = $500, which is located in savings account 1. And if I go to savings account 1, I can see that its balance is currently $1, 000, of which $500 is assigned to the veterinary budget.