Society makes budgeting simple and free

Yorkshire Building Society has launched a free comprehensive online budget planner for those who want a little help to organise their finances and manage their money.

The budget planner, which can be downloaded from the Society’s website in either Windows or Mac versions – ybs.co.uk/budgetplanner - enables finances to be monitored month by month. The system is more sophisticated than other free planners, which usually just provide a snapshot of finances, but less complicated than most ‘paid-for’ tools that are available.

Individuals do not need to register with the Yorkshire to access the planner and once it is downloaded it sits on their desktop without any data being passed back to the Society. Alternatively, a CD-ROM can be collected from any branch of Yorkshire Building Society.

Each planner is personalised to the individual and can be used to monitor income and expenditure against pre-set budgets in clear, easy to read fields or graphics. Each user can select the date on which the month starts (eg to co-ordinate with their own payday) and they can choose whether to start each month with a zero balance or to carry over the figures from the previous month.

David Jackson, Yorkshire’s Head of E-commerce said “We launched the budget planner on our website about six weeks ago without any promotion or publicity and already more than 1,500 people have downloaded the tool. The feedback we have had from these users has been positive, particularly from those who had tried other similar products that they felt were expensive and over-complicated. From a service point of view it is great to offer our customers a useful tool to help them manage their money without costing them to do so. We are currently investigating if the planner can be of assistance with a number of educational and community based groups.”