Applies to: Australia
Childcare is fortnightly, rates are quarterly, rego is annual, and most Australians are paid fortnightly. This household budget planner lets every line keep its own frequency, then takes an opening balance and projects your cash forward to the day it runs short.
Because converting by hand produces two specific mistakes, and both of them run one way. Neither is random, so neither averages out over a year.
The first is treating a month as four weeks. Four weeks is twenty-eight days, and twelve of those is 336 days rather than 365. In weeks: four a month is 48 a year against 52. A weekly grocery shop converted that way is understated by four weeks of groceries, every year, and the monthly figure it produces looks entirely reasonable.
The second is missing the third fortnight. A fortnightly salary arrives 26 times a year, not 24. Two months in every year contain three paydays rather than two, and a budget built on twelve equal months hides both of them.
| Entered | To a year | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly | × 52 | a week |
| Fortnightly | × 26 | a fortnight |
| Monthly | × 12 | a month |
| Quarterly | × 4 | a quarter |
| Annually | × 1 | a year |
A calendar year is 52 weeks and one day, or two in a leap year, so some years hold 53 weekly or 27 fortnightly payments. This page uses 52 and 26, which is what a normal year holds.
Registration, rates, strata, insurance premiums and school fees arrive quarterly or yearly, which means they arrive when you have not put anything aside for them. Any line entered at a quarterly or annual frequency is flagged automatically and given a per-pay set-aside — $900 a year of registration is $34.62 a fortnight.
You do not mark anything to make this happen. It is the same conversion the rest of the page runs, applied to the frequency you already chose, which is the only kind of feature worth adding to a tool people abandon because of typing.
Manual entry is why people give up on budgeting tools. Reported figures put it plainly: 67% of people who have tried a budgeting app rated it not helpful or too much effort, apps requiring manual entry lose users at roughly three times the rate of those with automatic bank sync, and median day-30 retention for personal finance apps sits around 38%.
This tool has no bank feed and is not going to have one, so every decision here is judged on what it costs you in typing rather than on whether it is a good idea.
Where a feature would have added fields, the version with fewer fields won.
It records, converts and projects. It does not advise, does not score you, does not suggest what to cut, and does not tell you that you have overspent. Budget against actual is shown as the percentage of the plan you have used, because red and green over-and-under indicators produce a guilt cycle and drive people off the tool entirely — which is the outcome everything here is arranged against. There is no red on this page for spending.
Not built, deliberately:
And it is not unclaimed ground. ASIC's Moneysmart budget planner already handles frequency correctly, and if a frequency-aware budget is all you need then Moneysmart is a good tool from a regulator and it is free. What is unusual is that almost nothing else does it: bank budgeting tools and essentially every budget spreadsheet ask for a monthly figure and push the conversion back onto you, straight into the two mistakes above.
It is also not trying to beat PocketSmith on their own ground. Their core is bank feeds and fourteen thousand institutions, and nothing here competes with that. What is here instead is manual entry done properly, per-item frequency, and nothing leaving the browser.
Benchmarks are coming, for four categories only. Those four are marked in the tool above so the marking has a stated reason:
The rest stay unbenchmarked because the data to do it honestly does not exist. The ABS Household Expenditure Survey — the only source that ever gave Australian spending by household composition — was last conducted in 2015-16 and published in September 2017. So "typical for a household like yours" is not a question that can be answered from current data for groceries, transport, telecommunications or general insurance, and this page will not pretend otherwise by ageing decade-old figures forward.