PocketSmith Review: Know Where Your Money Is Going

Keeping on top of bills and daily transactions at the same time as trying to put aside savings for the future is a task that never ends. That’s why money management apps have become so popular.

Money management apps have come along to keep track of all your accounts, investments, savings, and credit card transactions in one place, so you don’t lose control over your spending. PocketSmith is highly recommended, especially if you’ve been using a free app like Mint, but now you’re ready to upgrade to something more powerful.

Our Rating:

What Is PocketSmith?

PocketSmith is a powerful, global, personal money management system. It encompasses a mobile app for both iOS and Android along with a cloud-based desktop interface.

PocketSmith’s goal is to make it easier for you to keep track of where your money’s going so that you don’t get any nasty surprises. Its biggest feature is that it can connect with over 12,000 financial institutions worldwide (and counting – PocketSmith highly values ongoing innovation, so the R&D team is always working on adding new capabilities). This way, you can keep track of all your finances in one place, including investments, loans, credit cards – you can even track gold, silver, and bitcoin holdings, which is quite unusual for a money management app.

It also has powerful multi-currency support, showing automatic conversion to your base currency as well as your balance, so you can view your past, present, and future financial situation, internationally, without having to do all the math.

One more unique feature for PocketSmith is the forecasting ability. Most money management apps show you what happened to your money in the past, but PocketSmith also shows you what will happen to your money in the future if you should take that vacation or keep buying expensive coffee each morning. This guides you towards making better financial choices on a regular basis.

How Does It Work?

The app is designed to offer an intuitive and user-friendly process, so getting started is simple. The PocketSmith wizard guides you through each step. You can connect your account to your bank feeds for live financial data, manually import bank files, or transport your data from another personal finance app (PocketSmith can support file transfer from most apps, including Mint and YNAB). Then, you set up categories for transactions and create budgets so that you can see your cash flow, forecasting, and spending reports.

One of the best things about PocketSmith is that you can use it in demo mode, which means you can enter sample data and just get the hang of how it works before you go to the trouble of entering your real financial information and connecting bank feeds. That way, if you decide that it’s not for you, after all, there’s nothing to disconnect.

PocketSmith Key Features

Forecasting

PocketSmith uses your spending trends to sample how your spending/saving will accumulate for up to 30 years in the future.

Currency Exchanges

PocketSmith is an expert at dealing with different accounts or assets in different currencies, so you don’t have to do the math.

Budgeting Oriented

Using a budgeting calendar, allocating funds for your categories and tracking your expenses/income are all PocketSmith features that help you truly know where your money is going.

Scenario Testing

Before committing to a huge expense like a vacation, a new car or paying off serious debt, PocketSmith shows you how those decisions will affect your finances so you can make smart choices as to how you spend and save.

Reporting

From a full P&L statement of your expenses to calculating your net worth, PocketSmith offers all the tools necessary to show you how you’re spending your money.

PocketSmith Accounts

The PocketSmith Process

Using PocketSmith is simple and intuitive. Here’s what to expect:

1. Sign up. You’ll need to enter a username, your email address, and create a password.
2. If you choose the paid Premium or Super subscriptions, you’ll also need to choose a subscription period (monthly, quarterly, or annual billing, it’s up to you) and enter your credit card details.
3. You’ll now see your PocketSmith dashboard with a setup checklist.
4. The next step is to link your bank accounts (or connect a live feed if you have a Premium or Super account), connect to your previous budgeting apps or import your data manually by uploading bank files. Note: Due to changes in bank feeds in Canada, users have reported that their automatic connections are unreliable and will frequently disconnect. This isn’t an issue with any particular app but a security measure Canadian banks have put in place over the past few years. You can learn more about this here. 
5. Now, you’ll categorise your income and outgoings. You can use any category names you’d like, including emojis, or ask PocketSmith to auto-categorise your transactions. You can change, add, or delete categories whenever you’d like.
6. Create budgets for each category to keep track of how much you’ve spent in each period and spot overspending. You can set daily, weekly, or monthly budgets.
7. Finally, you’re ready to track your spending. You can use PocketSmith to create reports whenever you’d like, showing your transactions for specific periods, calculating your net worth across all your accounts, or zooming in on certain categories.

How secure is it?

As you’d expect from a personal finance app, PocketSmith takes security very seriously and goes into detail explaining not just what security measures they take, but why they made each decision. All of your interactions with the app are encrypted to a high level, rated A+ by SSL Labs.

Data is stored on private servers; all bank feeds are read-only; they use two-factor authentication each time you log in; and your password is stored in an encrypted format. The list of physical and virtual security measures is very reassuring for anyone who’s nervous about giving an app access to all of their financial information.

PocketSmith’s Drawbacks

Although their app offers a lot of great perks, especially for people who have multiple assets and accounts around the world, there are features that are missing from PocketSmith, that would otherwise provide a fully encompassing solution:

• No inventory management
• No bill payment feature
• No tax reporting
• Some features are available on desktop only
• Customer service is mainly available via email

Alternatives

PocketSmith is ideal for Canadians who use multiple currencies, like anyone who also has US accounts, travels overseas a lot, or is an expat living abroad. Mint is designed for managing money across multiple accounts in the same currency, making it great for entrepreneurs and business owners who need to track work income and expenditure as well as personal transactions. YNAB focuses on budgeting, with plenty of educational resources and strong budgeting tools.

PocketSmith’s best feature is its support for so many different currencies and accounts in multiple countries. It stands in glaring contrast to Mint, which only serves the US and Canada, and can’t support foreign currency accounts at all, and YNAB, which you can use in any currency, but then has an extremely complicated workaround for foreign currency tracking.

In terms of reports, PocketSmith holds its own with Mint and YNAB, and it’s the only one to offer future budget forecasting. However, the mobile app is a little weak in comparison – the full features are only accessible through the desktop app.

Pricing is the most obvious difference between PocketSmith, which costs $9.95/month for the Premium subscription, and Mint, which is free for all. PocketSmith does have a free version, but it’s quite basic, allowing only two accounts, 12 budgets, and lacking automatic bank feed capability. It can be more expensive than some competitors, but you do benefit from the ease and flexibility of being able to cancel your subscription whenever you’d like.

Customer Service

Customer service is an area where PocketSmith could do better. The knowledge base is huge and impressive, but customer support is only available by email [email protected], or through the online web form. Human customer service agents are available from 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM New Zealand time, which is equivalent to 5:00 PM to 1:00 AM EST, and due to the small staff, it takes an average of one day to get a response.

Our Verdict

PocketSmith is an astonishingly powerful and versatile money management app. In today’s global economy, it makes sense to have an app that can handle foreign currency, automate currency conversion, and juggle accounts in multiple countries.

It could do with better individual customer support, and if it could pay your bills for you as well as remind you when they’re due, there’d be no stopping it. That said, if you want an effective money management app that tracks all of your assets and transactions in one place, PocketSmith is a solid choice.