Hello, this is Mr. Chuck. And this is a bonus episode. So I forego my normal opening remarks. I did a 15 day free trial on a software called count about. I read an article about it months ago. And I was impressed with it. I kept putting it off because I really didn't think I need a personal finance software to keep track of my finances because I was using a different one. And I got all my debt paid off, I thought, well, maybe I do need to have something to keep my check register, separate from the bank. I'm old school. And it's always good to run a balance separate from the bank. So if the bank messes up or something strange happens, you can catch it. That's the point of reconciling your checking account. I know a lot of people don't do that anymore. But this software makes everything about doing that. Very easy. The first thing I want to talk about is my 15 day free trial. What is count about? I'll just read you what it says off their website. It's a customizable, easy to use and secure personal finance software. import from Quicken or mint, automate transaction downloads, and manage your money from anywhere. Since it's an online software, you have no software to download and install on your computer. Or you don't have to worry about any updates. Key features the only web based personal finance software that imports data from Quicken and met automate transactions downloading 10s of 1000s of financial institutions. fully customizable income and spending categories and tags, invoicing for small businesses, attachment capability for receipts in images, running balance, including uncleared transactions, reoccurring transactions, budgeting, financial reports, graphic and text based widgets provide quick view of financial activity. Color free interface was no distracting or irritating advertisement, easy use on web and ISO Android apps. excellent customer service. When I started my 15 day free trial, it was late at night. So my first suggestion is do it when the banks are not going to be doing any downtime on your online checking account. That's step one. When you first sign up for it, it's fairly easy. The first thing I recommend you do is go into the categories section, which is to the left lower, click on the gear wheel and upper right hand corner of the of that window. And I'd open it up for you. It can go down through there and you can edit the transactions to your liking the headers, you might want to leave the same, but like under utilities, they only had one it was utilities. And I broke down out gas, electric, water and sewer trash. each one separately. I don't know. That's why I've always done it. That's why I did that. I also under transfers, I put transfer to savings transfer to checking. Because that's I just want to see where it's going. That's just me I guess. And then I set up tags, I generally never use tags I don't. It's another way you can sort for reports. So I set up a tag for my investment account for my high yield savings account. And for my hobby, they say is got invoicing for small businesses, this program is probably good if you're a sole proprietor, one person operation or if you have a hobby where you make some money. You can then keep track of your income from that hobby and your expenses. You be able to generate a report so you can either give it to your tax preparer tax advisor or when you do your taxes, you got the information handy. They have three levels of service when you do the 15 day trial. You're automatically getting the deluxe version. The deluxe version About the only difference between the deluxe and the basic is the deluxe version, you can link to your bank, credit cards, your loans, and any investments. I have swab, I was able to link work great. I have credit card, Capital One at linked up. Great No problem, my checking and savings, no problem, my high yield savings, no problem. That was no problem after I waited to the right time of day to do it. You can also if you don't want to link your account, because you're you know, concerned about security, you can download reports from your bank and upload them and that works good. Don't do both don't link your account and don't download and try to load because then you'll have your transactions in their duplication, then you had to go through and delete half Oh, I recommend what I did was I when I got linked to my accounts, I just went back 31 days, I went back from the current day, say it was the 29th I went back to the previous month or the 29th. And I backed it up to the 28th. Why? So that way I got a good 30 day history, because my current day and bring in all the transactions for that day because it was like at noon. And there's at night, when the bank processes, there's some transactions that came in that was missing, that they will come in if you're linked the next day, no big deal. And they just missing it that Bitcoin. I wanted a 30 day history. It comes in again, you have to approve them. You can go in and update the categories, update the tag, change the description, clean it up, per se, you can put them in to your check roster one at a time, or you can do the whole 30 days and put them all at once. And once are in check your roster, you can then go through the items that you pay every month and set it up as a reoccurring journal and that journal, a reoccurring entry. That's my accounting background coming through. So I went back and say I had utility bills, I had phone bills, I had internet bills, I had gas electric, etc bills that I pay every month. So I went in and I clicked on it and then it was recurring journal entry, you have to put in the frequency monthly, it gives you a whole list where it's you know, it's gotta you just got to make sure you check everything. Also do not leave the date, the current date, because I was looking at December. And I was setting up a record drone actory and I left it in December, you need to change the date to the next time you're gonna pay the bill. So if it was December 20, you need to change the date to January 20. Then I had a question with these posts, the journal entries. And then they bring in the transaction from the bank. Well, I have two transaction or they merge them together, identify them and put them together. I'm pretty sure that puts them together. Because I really didn't have any duplications. After I worked out all my personal bugs that were user created. Sorry about that. If you download from the bank, and you have pending transaction, it'll show up as pending transactions in the register. And it will show it deducted from the balance except my bank. Pending transactions are a deducted from the balance that they were bringing in. So that was off a little bit but it wasn't exactly that amount. So this my example was I had three pending transactions. One on the current date I was in, say it was the 29th I pulled it in. So I have a pending on the 29th. I had a pending on the 28th. And I had a pending on a 27 the 27th and then 28 or deducted from the balance but 29th wasn't. It was kind of a screwy thing there. It kind of drove me crazy for a while until I figured it out. But the current day that you're bringing in if it's pending, it's different at treats at different than the previous two days. Then I was worried well these are also reoccurring journal entries, reoccurring entries. That I had set up that I knew were going to get in there, I was worried that maybe would be in there twice. It never popped up twice. So somehow it recognized it and either merged them together as one or dropped one off, I don't know, there was no duplications from that point forward. So it works great. Then after my 15 days, I decided, well, I don't need to have it linked up to all my banks and credit cards and loans and whatever. So I just paid for I didn't unlink anything, I left everything linked. I just went into my accounts, and I subscribe. And I put in like, you know, information, my credit card information, and they paid for it. And I set up the basic pay for the $9.99 a year, very reasonable for what you get for this program. It unlinked everything instantly for me, so I didn't have to worry about doing that. That was kind of nice. So it's easy to reconcile your bank, your balance your register to your bank, you can do it every day, if you want. It's easy to set up reoccurring entries. And it's easy to set up a budget, you just go on to the budget tab and go down through your categories. You can say use history, I had a 30 day history enter US history, it pulls it right in and does it every year. If it looks like it's too high, or if you know it's too high, you can go in and manually enter the dollar amounts. It'll probably take you five to 15 minutes to learn the program and find where everything is. And then it'll probably take you another 1520 minutes to get your categories and everything set up. Once you bring in your 30 days after that is fairly easy. It took me maybe five to 10 minutes to create my budget. And you have to click on it to activate it. So you can do reports took me another five or 10 minutes to go through all the reports. The only thing I don't like is it doesn't have a comparison report for the current or previous month of your actual expenses versus your budgeted expenses, your budgeted amounts. But to get around that what I did they have a thing called widgets that have homepage at crime down towards the bottom. You can create a count I did it as not a graph as a text. I created an expense account where it shows my income and my expenses what actually happened. And then I did the exact same thing, but I clicked on budget. So it showed the budget. And I set them both for the same month when they pop up. They're side by side, I can see the actual I can see what I budget and see if I'm in line with my budget or if I overspent and a category, or maybe one budgets too high. One category might be too high and I can adjust it down. So that was kind of nice. I did sign up to be an affiliate, though it is support the show. If you link on if you click on the heart on support the show, it will take you to the 15 day free trial page. And at some time in the future decide to use it and pay for it. I get a small commission. It's well worth $9.99 a year. You got 15 days to decide if it's for you or not. What more can you ask for? Click on the support to show link. Do your 15 day free trial. Look at the reviews and decide for yourself if he should acquire it and use it