https://pearbudget.com/set_up_2012

This page will allow you to plan for the amounts you plan to spend in each of your irregular categories, and also to start over fresh in any or all of those categories if you’d like to do so.  We apologize for the delay in getting the page up. (There’s lots of exciting behind the scenes things going on that should provide some exciting new features in 2012!)

If you run into any problems with the page or setting up for 2012, please send us an e-mail at help@pearbudget.com, and we’ll get right back to you!

The 2012 page is now available:

https://pearbudget.com/set_up_2012

We apologize for the delay!

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We know 2012 is coming down the road pretty quickly. We just wanted to give a quick note that we’re working on the “transition to 2012″ page, and that we hope to have it up very soon. It’ll allow you to start 2012 from scratch, so that if your numbers have gotten a little off over the last few months, or if you’ve taken a break and want to get back into budgeting, or if you just want to start your budget over for some other reason, you’ll be able to do so easily.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, just send us an e-mail at help@pearbudget.com, and Ruth or I will get back to you ASAP. Thanks!

We need your help.

A good friend of ours, Amit Gupta, has a very serious case of Leukemia. If he doesn’t find a bone marrow match and get a transplant soon, he will die. And “soon” isn’t, like, “some time in the next year.” We have three days from now to get entries into the system to save his life.

Now, if Amit were caucasian, his odds of finding a match would be pretty good. Four out of every five caucasians who get Leukemia can find a match. Amit’s family’s Indian, though. That means his odds are A LOT worse. As in, only ONE South Asian in every TWENTY THOUSAND who has Leukemia will have a match in the registry.

I really want Amit to be that one. Or, more honestly, I want to increase those odds, so a *lot* of South Asians can be “that one,” and I want Amit to be one of them.

Getting registered is really easy, and painless, and free. I got registered over a decade ago, back when you had to have blood drawn. Nowadays, getting into the registry is as simple as ordering a kit online (it’s free), swabbing your cheek with a Q-Tip thing, and then mailing it back in (again, totally free). To order a free swabbing kit, just go here: http://bethematch.org/. There’s also a list of bone marrow swab drives in different cities around the world, if that works better for you.

So here’s the deal. If you order a kit and send it back in (even if you never end up being a match for anybody), we’ll give you a month of free PearBudget coverage.

If you’re of South Asian descent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka) and you submit a swab kit to the registry, we’ll give you a free year of PearBudget coverage. If you have a friend who’s South Asian and you get them to submit a kit, you get the same deal. In fact, we’ll give you a year for every South Asian friend you get into the Bone Marrow Registry.

Even if you just post the following to Twitter, we’ll give your subscription a free week’s credit: “PearBudget’s trying to save a life and is giving away free budgeting software: http://blog.pearbudget.com/help-save-our-friends-life”

Basically, our goal is to get a lot of folks with South Asian bone marrow into the registry, and we need your help to do it. Help us out, help save Amit’s life, and get free PearBudget credit in the process. Check out Amit Gupta Needs You or send an e-mail to me (charlie@pearbudget.com) if you have any questions.

Thanks, friends, for any help you can give us.

We wanted it to be great.

So we’ve overhauled the Enter a Receipt process for those of you who are international users, and we’ve added in a calendar option for you. You still enter in receipts with a DD/MM/YY format (so, for example, today is 15/6/11). We hope it serves you well.

While we were working on this, we also upgraded the calendar for everybody So where you used to see a calendar that looked like this:

It now looks like this:

(The screenshot doesn’t show it, but when you’re highlighting a date, the background is bright green.)

There are a few bonus features this calendar gives you, and a few keyboard commands you can give it, if you’re so inclined.

• page up/down – previous/next month
• ctrl+page up/down – previous/next year
• ctrl+home – current month or open when closed
• ctrl+left/right – previous/next day
• ctrl+up/down – previous/next week
• enter – accept the selected date
• ctrl+end – close and erase the date
• escape – close the datepicker without selection

If you have any questions or comments, just get in touch! And if you uncover any bugs or any other bits and pieces that don’t work like you expect them to, don’t hesitate to let us know.

We’re still making a few tweaks here and there, but we’d love to get any feedback you have on how we can make the blog better, more useful, easier to search, and so on.

Also: Are there any articles you’d especially like for us to write? Any questions you want us to answer? Just let us know!

Thanks!

On the normal PearBudget website, your categories on the “Enter a Receipt” page are listed in alphabetical order. That had been the case with the “Enter a Receipt” sections of the mobile interfaces (the iPhone / iPod Touch, Android, and general mobile phone interfaces) as well.

As of now, though, when you enter a receipt when you’re on the go, PearBudget will note that the receipt’s category is an “on the go” category. And the next time you need to enter a receipt on your smartphone, PearBudget will list your “on the go” categories at the top of the list, so you won’t have to scroll down to find them. In fact, the “most-often-used” category should be pre-filled at the very top of the list, so if you’re always entering car gas receipts, or grocery receipts, or dining out receipts, or whatever, now you only have to enter in the amount of the new receipt and hit submit (if you don’t enter a date, PearBudget assumes you mean “today”).

There are a few other refinements we’re hoping to make to the mobile interfaces soon, but if you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them. Just e-mail us at help@pearbudget.com.