Review of Goodbudget App

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

Fill Envelopes 

Back to the literal cash budget metaphor, you will need to fill your envelopes when you get paid.  You can do this 2 way -- the first is with a new transaction. There are a bunch of different transaction types on the mobile app — for this you pick “fill from allocated.”  You have a specific button for this.  This is extremely easy on the website – just choose to either add your budgeted amount or set the total in the envelope to the budgeted amount. It’s takes a little more doing on the mobile app, but is not difficult. I also like that you can title this transaction and that it is saved as such.  This is one of my specific gripes with YNAB – they do a lot of the envelope allocation and distribution of to be budgeted funds behind the scenes and I would like all of this to be more transparent. GoodBudget does a great job of this.

Another way to fill  your envelopes is to do it directly from your paycheck. When you enter a transaction with the type of "income," you can determine which envelopes get the money from that paycheck. This turns a two-step process Into a one step process.  OK, so now that we have covered envelopes, accounts, and transactions, let’s talk about the

Budget view

I have to say, Goodbudget’s envelope view is more simple than I am used to.  Once you fill your envelopes and add in some transactions, this view will show you how much “cash“ you have left in each envelope visually with this green bar. Clicking on the total will bring you to a list of transactions and it also shows you how much you planned to budget for that envelope.  I would like to be able to see my envelope spending from last month or the current year, but there are other ways to see this information. Which brings us to

Reports

GoodBudget has quite a few reports that are available online. You can see them here. This is how you can see your budget for the previous month or a custom time period. You just have to change the time frame. The mobile app offers only three reports, but they are good ones and you can also change the timeframe for those reports.

Other

Just a couple of final things. You can transfer between envelopes using a transfer transaction, the search function is great both on the website and on the mobile app, and you can export your data to a CSV file. There is also an import function as I mentioned at the beginning of the video. In addition, GoodBudget provides a variety of articles, courses, and podcasts that help beginning budgeters to learn the app and learn how to budget well.

All in all, I was impressed with this app.  If you are someone who prefers to put in transactions manually and you don’t mind the $7 monthly fee, this app may be a good fit for you. Let me know what you think. Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.