Welcome to the Budgets Get Real Blog
It’s been just over a year since the first public release of Budgets Get Real.
It has been a great year. We would like to thank all of our kind supporters, without whom all this would not have been possible.
During that time there have been some significant Free bonus extensions added to the basic program. These include Password Vault, Small Business edition, Cash Commitments and the Future Spending Planner.
Support for automatic OFX statement download is a new extension soon to be released from testing. This will also be free to our existing customers.
There have been some 13 builds, most of which have entailed significant extra features. If you look at the Version history you will clearly see something our team is very proud of – almost negligible bug fixes required. This is because we put so much time into pre-release testing.
If you haven’t yet had a chance to check out our revamped web site we suggest you take a quick look at the following:
Our new main resources page. This is still the main contact from within the Budgets Get Real program.
New Video tutorial. A guided tour of Budgets Get Real to help you get up and running in the shortest time possible
Our updated documentation section. Most of this content is included within the program Help. This section contains the latest source content which is now searchable.
A new knowledge base section. Expect to see more significant content addition to this in the future!!!
Build 032 is due to be released shortly. Stay tuned because there are some great features to come. Best of all they’re free to our existing customers.
Once again, sincere thanks to you all from all of the Budgets Get Real team.
June 6th, 2008 at 5:09 am
Congratulations on making it to one year!
Thank you again for making such a great package, I can’t begin to tell you how much time you have saved me – even through something as simple as importing transactions.
What else do you have planned for the new build?
June 9th, 2008 at 1:47 am
I’ve never heard of OFX, is this something that is common in Australia?
What are the advantages of using this format?
June 13th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Hi Patrick,
OFX is the main standard for statements in USA and Canada. It is supported by virtually every bank and credit card institution. Almost all support logging-in electronically and downloading your statement. Only a few support automatic connection and automatic download.
OFX offers a number of advantages over CSV provided it is properly implemented. The main one is that each transaction has a unique identifier – its FITID tag.
In Australia some institutions provide OFX as a download format. Unfortunately some do not implement the FITID tag correctly and using these files is definitely not advised. With these institutions the transaction details change depending on the date range yo elect to download.
There is no need to use OFX in Australia since Budgets GetReal achieve the objectives of controlling duplicates for CSV, QIF and OFX file types. We suggest CSV for Australia and New Zealand.
Out technology allows us to do what Microsoft & Quicken were unable to do without creating the OFX standard. They can only control duplicates for OFX files – we can control it for CSV, QIF and OFX files i.e for virtually every banking institution in the world (not simply the US and Canada).
You might be interested to see what OFX files look like. If so go to
http://budgetsgetreal.com/index.php/91/what-should-my-statement-file-look-like/