With the four programs we list below, you can plan the regular budget of a household. The qualities of the platforms are: their simplicity to add your income and expenses, and to create good reports. After creating the budget, you can open and edit it to enter new expenses and income. In this way, you will keep your accounts balanced at home by creating simple budgets.
All the environments are free and available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems. And they offer you the possibility to export the budgets in the following formats: HTML, CSV, or PDF.
My Budget
We will start with My Budget, the simplest program for planning your household budget. When you launch the platform, you first have to set a passphrase (needed each time you start the program). Once you enter its interface, you will see two large sections: one for categories and another for monthly transactions. After adding categories and subcategories, you have to incorporate transactions to estimate costs. The tool will show you the estimate and a percentage of costs by categories (annual and divided by months). When you finish the work you can export it to a CSV file. You can link your bank account with the platform and see its status. But this function is only available for a few banks.
dsBudget
dsBudget is a simple but powerful budget planning program. When you run the platform, it starts from a window of your default browser (local server). From a side panel, you will find all the budget plans listed along with options to create a budget or search for an existing one. Then, you will find four sections: Income and deductions – Budget – Expenses – Balance.
Budgeter
Budgeter offers you the possibility to first create a budget and then plan it. This way, while you are spending, you will also be controlling your total budget on the go. To plan the budget you must fill a database with the following information: total income, total expenses, bank interests, etc. When you finish entering the data, the platform will give you a general balance. And at the end of the month it will give you a summary in PDF with the total spent and the savings.
Buddi
Buddi simplifies budget planning by having separate sections for each of your money sources (accounts), budgets, and reports. From Accounts you will add your income sources to build the budget (cash, checks, investments, savings, loans, liabilities, credit cards, credit lines, or a prepaid account). From Presupuesto, you can create a weekly or monthly plan. When you finish the work you can obtain a budget, account, and expense report in HTML or PDF format.
With the four platforms for planning your household budget, you will have different services to keep your accounts up to date and start saving.
