We have completely overhauled the Bill Tracker tool to make it more usable and useful for you. The Bill Tracker now works for bills that aren’t paid monthly by letting you set the bill in the same way you can create reminders. We have also upgraded the way the bills are displayed by color coding them based on when they’re due.

We’ve also tied the bill tracker and the reminders system together a little more. Now you can associate bills with reminders much easier. When you create a new bill or edit an existing one, you have the ability to have the system instantly create a reminder associated with the bill. You can decide right away whether you want to be notified and have the bill auto-post to your account or if you simply want to be notified so you can pay the bill manually.

As a premium member, you can now change the timeframe your bills are displayed for. By default you will see the next 30 days worth of bills but if you’re a premium member you can change this to 30, 60, 90 or 120 days. This should make it easier to plan for the future by seeing what bills will be due in the upcoming months.

A side effect of the new bills system is that some of your previously paid bills might show up as unpaid. If this happens, don’t worry, just click on the bill and click the Delete link. Next, click on the link to “Delete this due date.” This will remove the already paid bill from your list until it’s due next time.

We hope you enjoy the upgraded Bill Tracker. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about the tool, please let us know through the comments or by contacting us via the link at the bottom right side of the page.

We're proud to announce the release of our very own Debt Snowball tool to all ClearCheckbook users. The Debt Snowball is a method of loan/debt repayment that has you pay off your smallest debts first. Each time you pay a debt off you take that money and apply it to your next smallest debt. The idea is that as time goes on, you're paying more and more toward your debts similarly to a snowball growing as it goes down a mountain.

The Debt Snowball tool will show you when your loans will be paid off based on your minimum payments and any additional money you're putting toward your debt each month. We also provide you with how much interest is yet to be paid off and a progress bar so you can see how close you are to getting rid of a loan.

The Debt Snowball tool can be found through the Tools menu. In addition to the Debt Snowball page, we also have a gadget so you can quickly see your balances and loan payoff dates from your Dashboard.

You can read some of the help documents about the Debt Snowball tool here: https://www.clearcheckbook.com/help#25

We have updated our Currency Conversions feature so that it now downloads a list of conversions nightly for a majority of our currencies. Each night the rates will be updated on the site so you won't have to manually update the rates as they change. You can however manually update the rates if you'd like to input newer rates than what is currently available.

This should help keep your accounts better up to date and take the responsibility of keeping the rates updated out of your hands.

The currency conversions are provided for free by Time Genie

We've spent some time going through and updating most of the reports on ClearCheckbook to make them more useful. We've switched to a new method of generating the reports that now makes them interactive. Simply hover over your reports and you can get detailed information about the spending or saving.

We have also updated the overall reports to take currency conversions into account. The overall spending vs. saving report will now convert all currencies to your global currency for display purposes.

The following reports received the upgrade today:
- Accounts (Line, Bar and Advanced)
- Category (Pie)
- Custom Reports
- Report Dashboard Gadget

We have also re-worked the way the report data is generated, so it should help speed up viewing the reports as well.

We have completed all of our database updates that we had been running over the last several nights. These updates were aimed at future-proofing our database by setting up some archives as well as taking a second look at our indexes and updating them appropriately. Between these two updates, we have cut our CPU and memory loads in half. You should definitely notice the site loading faster now.

A side effect some of you may see are a temporary error in your balances. If your balances seem off to you or they aren’t showing all of your accounts, simply click the Refresh Balances link located under your balances and they will be re-calculated for you.

Our next upgrade will be coming in the following weeks and will involve setting up an additional server to run in our environment. This will provide more redundancy and will also improve response time.

Thanks for your patience while we performed these updates. I know many of you were affected by some slow-downs or the site not loading, and we’re extremely sorry for that.