Category: Career and Business

FREE Full-Featured Three-Month Trial: CommonCents Envelope Budget Software

A lot of us likely use – and are enthusiastic about – the envelope system of budgeting. It’s a good way to plan your spending and avoid over-spending, and it’s extremely simple. You allot specific amounts for each category in your budget and place cash in paper envelopes. When the cash is gone, you stop spending.

The only difficult part of using the envelope method is planning your non-cash expenditures (like the electric bill, for instance), and you still have to use a separate spreadsheet for tracking your finances.

These days, software is available that helps you do both, and one very good system is the CommonCents budget system. Last year, I wrote a press release for the developers and learned quite a bit about how it works.

There is a free full-featured three-month trial of CommonCents available for download. If you decide that CommonCents is perfect for keeping track of your family’s finances, the one-time cost is only $34.95.

It has too many features to list in one post, but here are some of my favorite things about CommonCents:

• It lives on your personal computer, not online.
• It’s simple and flexible. If you just have one checking account and a few budget categories, you can still use CommonCents — but  many of its features are perfect for those of us who have finances that are very complex, with multiple income sources, savings, checking, and investment accounts, lots of envelope categories, etc. Because CommonCents is flexible, it can grow with you as your finances do.
• You can see the total of all of your money and the amount in each envelope on one screen.
• Automatic deposits or deductions can be set up for recurring events, or you can manually enter transactions, or you can use a combination of both.
• You can “split” expenses into different categories. How many times have you gone shopping at a super-mega store and made purchases in the grocery category, household category, books, clothing, toys, etc. in one trip? That’s when this feature can be very helpful.
• All the data you’ve entered into CommonCents can be exported in a variety of standard formats. It takes the concern out of spending all that time with your budget – you’ll have a copy of your information whenever you need it.

Try the 3-month download and see what you think. While you’re at the website, check out the video tutorials to see more about how it works.

CommonCents Budgeting Software Free Trial 

I’m not receiving any kind of financial compensation for writing about this software. Last year I was contracted to write a press release and do some marketing for the company – a one-time gig. I’m also good friends with the woman who does the voice-over in the video tutorials!