Review of Dollarbird Budgeting Calendar App

Показать описание

In this video, I will review the Dollarbird personal finance calendar app. This is part of a series where I review apps for financial budgeting.

Please subscribe and leave comments below!

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel, and in today’s video, I will review the Dollarbird personal finance calendar app. This is part of a series where I review apps for financial budgeting.

What I have learned from reviewing a bunch of budgeting apps is that people think about budgeting in lots of different ways. This app is not really a budgeting app as it turns out. It SEEMS like a budgeting app. You put in transactions, you categorize them, you produce some reporting. But the big difference is that with budgeting apps, you set a budget. That means that you determine how much you want to spend for a period — say a month and then you report on your actual spending against this plan.

The Dollarbird app is a different animal. It is the most stripped down, simple app that I have reviewed so far. Normally in budgeting apps, there are accounts, within the accounts there are transactions, then there are Budget categories, and finally reports both on your budget and on a variety of other things.

The Dollarbird app is based around a calendar. The free version gives you one calendar, but you can pay a fee (just over $3 per month) to have more than one calendar. Instead of setting a plan for how much you want to spend in a given time frame, Dollarbird allows you to see on a calendar when your bills will come due. In other words – it allows you to project spending.

So, you enter in transactions. The new transaction interface has some good artificial intelligence that tries to automatically categorize transactions and apparently learns about your vendors over time. It can do repeating transactions, so you can put in your recurring rent, car payment, and utility bills. You can also put in memos and photos, but there is no ability to split transactions, so if you have spending that belongs to two categories you will need to put in two separate transactions. Dollarbird has default budget categories, but they are extremely easy to edit, delete, or add to. They are sorted alphabetically only.

This is where things start to veer apart from a typical budget app. There is no budgeted amount associated with the spending category. So that means that even though you have a Household budget category, you cannot assign an amount of say $150 to it. In addition, there are no accounts – meaning Dollarbird does not care whether the spending comes from your checking account or from a credit card account. There are no groups associated with the budget categories. There is no way to transfer between categories and no way to search for a specific transaction. And most importantly, there is no budget view. Which means there is no way to view how much you have spent in each category. Which leaves me to vaguely wonder why you would want to categorize transactions in the first place?

What you do have, is a way to view your spending from a calendar view. This allows you to see when your spending should occur throughout the month, as long as you can accurately predict future spending. In addition, the one report that Dollarbird can produce, is a cash flow report. That provides a sense of how much cash you have on hand and can also project that number into the future – as long as you are accurately anticipating your future expenses.

Although I said at the outset that this is not a budgeting app per se, this is an alternate way of organizing your financial information and using that information to make good decisions. After all, it’s very difficult for us to keep all of our outstanding financial commitments in our head, so sometimes we end up overspending without realizing that — for example our car payment is due the next day. I am a budget nerd, so I prefer to stash the money away for upcoming bills, but I can see how this system would work well for a person who thinks slightly differently. Let me know what you think! Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.