1. Set the database location

By default Piggybudget stores your budget data in a subfolder of your home folder. By passing the option -database LOCATION to the program when it is run from the command line (where LOCATION is the folder you want to use) the database will be stored in an alternate location of your choosing.

2. Selecting which categories to show in graphs

In the sidepanel of the views for Categories, Payees and Accounts there is an action link labelled "Show Expenses As Graph" that will display the period's expenses in a bar graph. One interesting feature of this view is that the categories shown in the graph correspond to the categories currently expanded or collapsed in the Category tree view. This way you can drill into more specific categories for your reports or view graphs for top level more general categories.

3. Budgets

You can set a budget on any Category, Payee or Account, specifying an amount and a period and you will be able to see how your expenses track against it. When you exceed the budget for the given period the extra amount will appear in the Overdraft column of the Category but also in all its parent Categories (adding up with their own overdrafts).

The budget is adjusted for the reporting period you select, so if for example a category has a budget 100 per month and you are viewing items per year the budget for that category will become 12x100 therefore 1200. The opposite does not happen though when you are viewing a smaller period, so if you are viewing items for a day that budget will remain 100.

A new minor release of Piggybudget(version 1.0.1) is now available, mainly fixing this bug.

I am pleased to announce that Piggybudget version 1.0 is available for download. Piggybudget is a FREE personal budget manager, which allows you to track your expenses against a budget.

Here is a screenshot:

Piggybudget is written in Java and requires version Java SE 6.0 to run.

This is the first public release. Go get it while it's fresh.