OOTD Budgeting Editions

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The Power Budget Edition that you are using now is OOTD’s classic edition that is free of charge and advertising.  It offers simple and easy to use integrated online budgeting and cash tracking on a single web page whether you are new to budgeting or an experienced budgeter.

While budgeting and cash tracking remain the core functions in the Power Budget Edition, also provided are a number of additional productivity features like e-mail reminders, month end reports and transactional accounts that users can open and maintain for tracking non budget money affairs like loans or savings that span beyond one or more budgeting monthly period.  Using the Power Budget Edition is done in complete anonymity where the user’s personal identity is never given out, nor is access to the user’s bank accounts.

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the  Master Control Edition is an initiative driven by the OOTD community of users as were many other enhancements to the OOTD budgeting website.  If you are a new OOTD budgeting account holder here, it may be a good idea for you to use the Power Budget Edition for a month or two with emphasis on using one of the two transactional categories before reading more about the Master Control Edition here.  Transactional categories in your Power Budget Edition are the two categories with the little icon showing next to them by the green column.

If you used OOTD budgeting for a while you know that except for two “catch all” categories, all budget categories are not transactional categories.  That means that all those categories will take and hold a single amount representing your current balance for that category and will not be able to show you the details behind that single amount.  So if for example you have in your “Restaurant Spending” category at the end of the month an amount of say $368 and you want to know when and where you spent all this money one dining at a time, you will have to rely on your memory as to which restaurants you went to and what the occasions were as well as the amount spent for each dining or you will have to investigate your credit card statement, that is if you never pay cash for restaurants.

Transactional categories however, like the two categories offered in the Power Budget Edition, address this issue by allowing you to enter each amount item to the category as a single transaction with date and description, where the system will record and save your transactions for future viewing.  So now rather than having only this to look at:

Category total

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You can also have this to look at:

Category details

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The Mater Control Edition idea is a product stemming from the OOTD community of users desire to have an optional fee based “Pro” version of the existing free Power Budget Edition that will offer all that the free version offers plus all the budget categories being transactional categories for total control over where every penny of your money has gone.

We started to ask users who expressed interest in this upgrade, what kind of annual fee would they be willing to pay for the fee based Mater Control Edition .  The range emerging from our survey to-date is from $10 to $25 per year.  With such interest and specific messages from users, we decided to open this  formal blog page to allow and invite an open forum where users can pledge their support for this upgrade publicly, share ideas with other users and allow us to better gauge the popularity and viability of this upgrade to the OOTD budgeting website.

We will  make a decision regarding the development of the Control Master Edition based on users feedback and comments here.  To ensure that your vote here counts, please make sure that you specify an annual fee amount in US Dollars that you are willing to pay for this fee based version.

Happy budgeting,

Shony