Budget Baker (Wallet App) Getting Started

Wallet budget bakers image

The Wallet App (BudgetBakers) is a great app for those who want more granular control of their finance tracking.

Pros

  1. You can import records manually. This means if your bank is not supported in the account linking no worries
  2. The CSV import in particular works pretty well. It allows you to map columns etc
  3. Wallet allows for managing accounts with different currencies.
  4. Wallet is mobile first. There have been many times that I’ve been outside and I remember a category I want to create and it’s great that I can do it from the mobile app app
  5. You get stats on a specific account
  6. Most features are available for free

Cons

  1. Wallet treats credit card accounts like an asset account
  2. Wallet doesn’t allow for detailed future budgeting (you can only do the standard goal setting)

Tips

  1. Do NOT connect to your bank account. The issue with the bank sync is that it only goes back to 2 months prior for some bank accounts and you can’t manually add records to those account. Future tips assume that all accounts were created manually
  2. Before importing the bank records be sure to set the starting balance to the balance at the start of the import period
  3. Use the website to do CSV imports. I find it easier to do imports on the computer instread of the mobile app
  4. For credit card accounts (or any other liability account) the starting balance should be a negative number (or 0). If you don’t do this Wallet will recognize the balance as positive.
  5. Ensure that money moved between your accounts are marked as transfers. E.g a credit card payment should be marked as a transfer between your asset account (e.g. checking) to the credit card. This helps avoid the credit card payment from showing up as income. By accurately marking transfers, the charts provided will be accurate. You don’t want money transferred from another account showing up as “income”.
  6. When you do imports you should confirm the balance for that account in the app matches the account’s official statement. If it doesn’t then something went wrong somewhere along the line. There can many many reasons why an import could go wrong but some that I’ve encountered include the impot seemingly being too large , issue with the export that was too large, incorrect starting balance
  7. If there is something wrong with the import you can delete the import (and the records that was added from the import). This granular control makes Wallet viable
  8. Use a spreadsheet to plan future budget in detail and set the budgets in Wallet’s budget section so that you can get alerts. I created a basic spreadsheet found here than can help.

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