Hi everyone it’s my first time posting I’ve been reading for a while and you seem like a friendly bunch so I thought I’d join in the discussion.
I used money dashboard for many years and my favourite tool was the planner. Since they’re creating a new app which doesn’t have that feature (and I have to start again with transaction data) I moved to Emma. It seems a lot more stable so I’d love to see my favourite tool appear in the app some day.
My use of the planner was simple. I wanted to predict my future situation by adding all my regular incoming and outgoings whether monthly or yearly. You can then scroll down through all your past (predicted not real) and future transactions in a list and also see your progress in a chart over 3/6/9/12 months.
So for example I can see that I’m going to be X amount better off each month, and have a certain amount in 3 months or a year. I can also adjust planner transaction amounts e.g. spending less on nights out with friends each week to see how it affects my future. It’s also quite rewarding to see your future predictions improve as you make changes to your spending or improve your income.
Hope all of this makes sense. I guess it’s hard to visualise. I would include screenshots but they don’t have a scramble feature like Emma. Thanks for all the good work on the app I’ve been a happy user for several months now.
This is exactly what I’d like to see in the app too. Would save me downloadIng transactions and uploading into excel and other apps to predict my financial future.
I used to use money dashboard too, There were 3 key features. I can’t tick 1 of those off the list Now that I’m ok pro, hope to see the remaining 2 features in the future
Hey @graham1 thanks for posting and welcome to the Emma community
Adding a planner is definitely something we’re looking into!
Would you say the biggest draw of using a planner like this is for motivational purposes? As in, keep on managing your money well and you could have X amount in savings by the end of the year…?
I’ve got actuals from Emma and future regular payments listed in excel and a summary table showing projected in month lows for the next 18 months.
That way I can make sure that although my current balances look healthy , this time next year (when I have paid for x, y and z) things will look a bit different and I’ll need to be frugal in the meantime.
I used to love this feature in money dashboard too. I loved the unrealistic balance I should have been able to achieve if I stuck to every budget every week!
This sounds like a really great way of doing things… at the moment I just plan to spend & save the same amount of money each month, but then I’m not taking into consideration the months when I might have increased expenses (holidays, etc…) Something for me to think about!
Me too. I would love if you could include the end dates of any direct debits or debt repayments to help foreword forecast. I’m actually surprised they don’t have some kind of forecasting function even at a very basic level!
We’ve just introduced a forecasting tool that says how long it’ll take to become a millionaire (just a bit of fun - can access by clicking on Net worth, then holding the balance down) so the forecasting idea is deffo a space we’re interested in exploring at some point!
Hi
When editing a committed payment/subscription, would be handy if you could put an end date so not to expect a further payment after a given time, as I have a couple subscriptions that are only a couple months/year long (like loans or the PayPal payin3) so wouldn’t want the future budgeting to show those after they have finished
Hey Dan! So basically you’d just add an end date and then when that date had passed the subscription moves from an Active subscription to an Inactive subscription?
Money dashboard just announced they’re adding this feature back. I guess I wasn’t the only one who stopped using their app when they discontinued support for it. I would spend hours on the planner making predictions and visualising how much I’ll have in 6 months, 1 year, 5 years etc. It seems a lot of people must have spent most of their time using planner since it’s coming to their new app.
I was hoping Emma would add this before they realised their mistake and added it back so I don’t have to start using their app again. It would be nice to keep everything under one app. Emma has been fantastic so I’ll keep using it. But with this news I’ll also be using Dashboard again to plan my future.
They decided to start again with their app and created a new one which didn’t include planner. Their new app is just viewing transactions and Emma does that better. The feature is still there on the legacy app but knowing it was no longer supported and would eventually disappear I could not keep using it.
You need a cash flow forecasting section that can incorporate income, savings, loans, mortgages, and tax
it needs the ability to be able to put in the many variables that are associated.
it needs to show the balance of each in 1 - 6 months 1, 5, 10, ,15-35 year increments (longer time frames could be at a premium) if current saving, spending, habits, and bills stay constant so you can understand how a mortgage or savings will affect you in the long term.
Scenarios would also be usefull! with this, your referral program becomes extremely valuable as you can check how deals affect the user’s finances over decades and are more likely to get a conversion.
i have a spreadsheet that currently takes your data via export and gives me all this functionality. happy to share.
manual accounts,
future predictions,
