Accountant Sam Manages His Personal Finance With PocketSmith

Read how Sam crunches the numbers of his family’s finances with PocketSmith’s powerful reporting and helpful visualization features.

Tell us a little about yourself? 

I’m a trained accountant, self-taught comic artist and recovering academic! I’m originally from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia but I now call Hamilton, New Zealand home. I’m really looking forward to making a trip back to Kuala Lumpur once the travel restrictions have loosened up a little bit. I have three awesome kids, a super cool wife and parents who support me. I’ve been taught to be fiscally responsible from a young age and I love all things money and finance!

How would you describe your role in your household? 

I religiously monitor the family expenses and ensure that we have enough money to do the things we want to do. My role is more of strategic oversight of ensuring that we are spending within the limits so that we can achieve our financial goals. My wife tends to take charge of the operational side of things, like day-to-day spending and spending while on holidays and trips.

What drew you to PocketSmith? 

Honestly? Initially, it was bank feeds. Over time, I grew to like its reporting abilities and the highly informative dashboard. There is so much you can do with PocketSmith and it sometimes feels like every day I’m discovering something new!

How long have you been with us? 

I’ve been with PocketSmith since mid-2015 — which was the year after I moved to NZ. I had been with YNAB prior but I got sick of manually reconciling transactions. I wanted software that could automate that for me. Enter PocketSmith!

What do you primarily use PocketSmith for? 

Household bookkeeping. I track our income and expenses, and ensure that we end each month with at least a 50% surplus so that we can shove it into our investments. I like being able to review spending by category as well — the pie chart on the Transactions page is amazing for this. It shows what our largest expenses are by percentage. Every month I keep trying to ensure that we’re keeping expenses within budget.

How has PocketSmith changed the way you do money? 

I’ve always been a money-minded, tight-fisted accountant, so it didn’t really change the way I do money — but it does give me peace of mind knowing that we are on track to achieving our financial goals. If anything, being able to track my money through PocketSmith means that we can better predict our coming expenses and put even more into our savings. In fact, we like to keep only a minimal amount in our spending accounts to force us to trick ourselves into thinking that we don’t have money (even though we do) so that we spend less on junk.

What are your favorite features? 

Budgeting, budget tracking, the budget rollover feature and that pie chart too!

Got any tips?

Figure out what your financial goals are. Once you’ve determined what you want to do, you can better understand how to spend your money. Make every dollar count. Money is a tool, a means to an end, so use it wisely to achieve your financial goals. Don’t work for money, make money work for you! For more financial, accounting and small business tips, check out my website, The Comic Accountant!

What’s the best money decision you made in the past 12 months?

Personally, we’ve been building up our first home deposit in P2P lending investment platforms like Squirrel. It’s riskier than a term deposit but offers much better returns over a similar period of time. Professionally, I’ve been hiring a team to expand my growing accounting firm which has paid off in terms of increased sales and better customer engagement!