Inzolo Blog

Sometimes when friends ask me about Inzolo I will say it is a virtual envelope budget system. Often, the response is, what is and envelope budget?

This concept has been around for probably as long as cash and envelopes have been. Basically, with and envelope budget, when you get a paycheck, you cash it, and divide the money into different labeled envelopes representing spending categories. Then as a bill comes due, or you go to get groceries, you spend money from its assigned envelope. When the money runs out, you’re done spending, or you choose to sacrifice from another envelope. It’s really that simple.

Below is a video from the No Credit Needed blog showing the envelope budget using monopoly money.

Angel writes:

I downloaded ATM cash transactions.   How do I transfer this cash transaction from the Checking account to my  Generic bank account that I have set up as a cash spending account?
And how do I input into envelopes when I spend  cash out of this Generic bank account?

You can track your cash just as any other account, but you will have to do it all manually. First, if you haven’t done so, add a new account. Here is the settings I used to create a cash account:

Now, let’s say you withdrew $100 from your checking account. You would likely see a withdrawal from your checking account if you are downloading transactions via OFX direct connect, or if you are importing transactions from a file. To add that $100 to your cash account, simply click the Add Transaction button:

You would now add a deposit to your Cash account of $100.

Now, you can budget your cash into envelopes as you do you other accounts. Whenever you spend cash, you can simply add addition transactions just as above but your transactions will be withdrawals rather than deposits.

Inzolo support importing transactions via Quicken (QIF) and Microsoft Money (OFX) formatted files. I generally recommend using OFX because OFX files have a unique ID associated with each transaction. This allows me to ignore re-importing transactions you have purposefully deleted.

What if you don’t want to ignore previously deleted transactions? Well, now you have that choice. I have added an option to the import transaction view that allows you to re-import previously deleted transactions.

I’m a visual person. I’ve added icons to default envelopes (the envelopes you can select when you sign up for the site). I have also added the ability to set envelope icons when you edit an envelope. Currently only the default icons are available, but look for more icon sets to be added soon!

Also, I’m in the process of building a forum that is pretty much ready. Point your browser to http://inzolo.com/forum to join.

I noticed a bug that when you enter a manual transaction and notice that you associated it with the wrong account, then edit that transaction the account balances in each account were not being reflected. I’ve fixed this issue.

Also, I made it possible to enter the allocation screen even if your unallocated income box is zero. My initial thoughts were if you had no money to allocate then you would have no reason to go there, but the allocation screen has become useful for more than just allocating income. You can use it to quickly modify goal amounts, see how much you’ve funded for a given month compared to your goal and update allocation plans.

As an example, I have a Jungle Disk account. I love it. I pay a small monthly fee and I have a reliable online back-up system plus access to all my files from any of my 5 computers with various operating systems. Slowly the monthly cost goes up depending on how much storage I use. So I wanted to modify my monthly goal and my allocation plan. Rather than waiting for my next income to update it, I can be pro-active and make the changes as soon as I notice them.

I’ve made a number of bug fixes and updates, but the most notable I’ll mention is the ability to allocate a percentage of your available allocation money. By entered a number followed by the percent sign (%), it will calculate the percentage automatically.

Here’s a short video of the update in action:
http://screencast.com/t/mRaQMFxN

I have had a few reports of people not being able to connect to their bank via OFX. It was difficult to diagnose because I have two different banks that are working fine. But I did manage to tweak a few items that I hope will resolve issues for other banks. If you know your bank supports OFX and have had problems connecting to it with Inzolo, please try again. At the very least you may get a more informative error message if you still can’t connect.

I’ve been thinking about the pricing model.  My wife said $7.23 per month is a stupid price. Yeah, OK, it was a pie in the sky type of number (7 was my high school football and baseball number, 23 was my basketball number). So I decided to get real and make a better pricing model.

So, the new monthly cost is $4.95 per month. I know you could easily spend that eating out at lunch one day so it should be quite manageable.

There is a new option now as well. You may sign up for a yearly subscription for $34.95 per month. I’m sure you can create an envelope to drop in $2.92 per month. For me, that is only $1.46 per paycheck. I’m a cheapskate and I would definitely pay that price. I was putting away $13.20 per month to pay for another envelope budgeting system for 3 years, that’s a big reason why I wrote my own tool in the first place.

So I hope you like the new pricing model. I’m always open to feedback so feel free to drop me a line!

I’ve added bank account balances and totals (if there is more than one account) below envelope totals. This well help you get an idea if everything is synced correctly. Once you have assigned all unassigned transactions, your envelopes & unallocated income total (labeled "Account Total") should match your bank accounts total.

Note that bank balances are a new feature as of yesterday, so for those with existing accounts, if you have done anything at all I can almost guarantee your bank account balances will not be right. You will need to manually set your current balance. To do this, get the current balance from you bank and edit your bank account by doing the following:

1. Click the Bank Accounts button.
   
2. Click the edit icon on a bank account to edit.
   
3. Enter your current balance and click Save.
   

Quick Update!

Rather than write another blog post I’ll just add to this one. I’ve added an Unassigned total to get a better picture of whether your transactions and envelope balances match your bank accounts. See the screenshot:

I’ve added some new features today – mostly dealing with bank accounts. There is now a new view to add, edit and remove bank accounts. On the budget screen you may notice a new button:

This will take you to the new bank accounts view. Here you can manage the bank accounts you have added to your account:

Also, when adding a new bank account you will be asked for a opening balance and the date of that opening balance. This date is mostly applicable to the automatic import accounts as Inzolo will now only retrieve transactions back to that date.

I’ve added some functionality to keep track of the bank account balance as well, but it is not fully tested and I think there might be some issues with it still so stay tuned for an update on this.