You may be wondering “If I’m not logging past transactions how do I know what numbers to input for my projected cash flows?” In this age of open banking, the answer is fintech.
The reason we’re hating on every other Excel budget that has you logging past transactions is because there is better technology for that! Like Empower’s Personal Dashboard—a free service (the best I have found) that you can add all your accounts to (cash, investments, credit, etc) and it gives you views of all your spending. (Not an ad—but flattered if you think we’re getting sponsorships…)
What Empower doesn’t offer is what FUNds does—the customizable forward-looking projection. But those past transactions can inform the projection, which makes a potential combination powerful. So I built the combination.
- In the new version of FUNds, I made enhancements so you can download all your transaction data from Empower and paste them in to feed your projected cash flows (using new custom formulas).
I’ve mentioned some Excel principles I live by before, and this functionality follows another one that I frequently see people break: Never change source data outside of the source. What I mean is
- I often see people manually make changes to pulled data when creating some summary.
- But if you go changing the pulled data, you’re stuck backtracking your changes next time you want to pull in updated data from the same source.
- Instead, paste the data in as-is and build formulas to reference, change, or create summaries.
- Let Excel do the heavy lifting!
If that isn’t interesting enough to download the latest version, here are other new things:
- Summary view of what percentage of your income is going towards each category
- The Credit Cards, Loyalty Points & Miles, Changes, and Planned tabs are now sortable
- Macros to hide/unhide guidance in each tab as well as unused rows in NTM
And if you’re hesitant because you already are using the prior version and you don’t want to start over—you don’t need to. I built some bots into the website to automatically migrate data to the new template (let the website do the heavy lifting!). (Don’t worry, I’m not snooping on your finances. Just the bots—and they’re not judgmental)
Basically no reason to not download the new one.