Mvelopes Personal Budgeting Software Features Review
Users of personal finance software know there are key features you can’t live without when it comes to automating the management of your personal finances. While the needs of everyone differ and finding the right product is important for your situation, Mvelopes Personal offers some features that put it in the top tier. They seem to do it right by offering some classic styles of budgeting on an electronic platform.
4 Features of Mvelopes
1. Envelopes Budgeting
Envelopes budgeting has been around a long time. In short, the premise is to use cash envelopes to manage your money. You simply create an envelope for every major budget category and deposit cash into it according to your written plan. You use the cash to make purchases and when the cash is gone you’re done spending.
Mvelopes has taken a manual process as described above and automated it. With Mvelopes you set up electronic envelopes to manage your cash flow. As expenses are recorded, the amount is deducted from the virtual envelope giving you a quick way to see the balance of each budget category. As you watch the balances while you spend, you’re much less likely to overspend and in some cases save money. offers some features that put it in the top tier. They seem to do it right by offering some classic styles of budgeting on an electronic platform.
2. Transfer Money Between Budget Envelopes
As with a cash envelope, you might have money left over in a budget category and need to spend more in another area. With Mvelopes you can electronically transfer money from one envelope to another keeping your budget in balance. For example, let’s say you have under spent $30 on groceries for the month. You could easily allocate the extra money to cover the need for more gasoline, or to savings.
3. Allocate Income for Budget envelopes
With cash envelopes you withdrawal money from the bank after your paycheck is deposited and insert the proper amount into each of your physical envelopes. The equivalent is provided with Mvelopes by allowing you to set up funding plans which enable you to determine how you want to allocate money for your paychecks. Once you receive your deposit transaction into Mvelopes you choose your funding plan which deposits your money into each virtual envelope.
4. Drag and Drop Features of Mvelopes
Once transactions are downloaded from your financial institution, you can drag and drop them to an expense envelope, or to your income cash pool for funding. This feature saves quite a bit of time for assigning transactions to their respective budget category or envelope.
There are many features of Mvelopes, but these four features seem to provide a lot of help in enhancing personal money management.
Personally, I don’t think I could live without using personal finance software. Some people choose to reconcile their checkbooks and maintain a budget manually; there is nothing wrong with this. Software can provide efficiency and exactness that is sometimes hard to get with a manual approach, but at the end of the day people should choose the approach that works best for them.
Do you have any experience working with Mvelopes? If so let us know about your favorite features in the comments.
Mvelopes has a 14 day free trial. I recommend signing up for the free trial to test it out for your needs.
This is an article I originally posted at Christian Personal Finance.
Jason,
What do you see as the advantages / disadvantages of using Mvelopes software vs tangible cash envelopes?
Lakita, great question. I think you have to evaluate what helps you manage money the best. Some people would rather take out cash from the bank every month and fund physical envelopes. Personally, I like to keep it electronic. I fund my electronic envelopes by setting up a funding plan in the application for my deposits. I also drag and drop spending transactions into the envelopes versus physically spending cash out of them. A nice advantage to the electronic envelope budgeting is the abilty to run reports on all of your spending to see where you’re perhaps over or under spending each month. Also, Mvleopes bill pay wil deduct spending from envelopes; everything ties in nicely together. An advantage to physical envelopes is that you might spend less (depends on the person) when you have cash in-hand versus a check or credit card. I’m sure there are other pros and cons, but hopefully,this helps.
Oh, and for more information, here is a link to my Mvelopes review which covers more about the product: http://onemoneydesign.com/blog/2009/09/02/mvelopes-personal-finance-software-review/