The time has finally arrived... you can now set monthly limits on your spending categories! Members have been requesting this feature for quite some time and we're proud to announce it's finally here. This will be a great tool for helping you set budgets each month.

In the new Monthly Spending Limits manager you can quickly add, view, edit and remove limits for accounts and categories. Forget using envelopes to manage your money each month, let us do it for you automatically. Once you set up a limit for an account or category, as soon as you make a purchase in that account or category it deducts from your limit and shows you how much you've spent.

As you can see from the screenshot on the left, my budgeting could use a little work. Now that the limits manager has been set up, it'll be a lot easier to judge how much I can spend on different categories each month.

You really need to check it out and see how awesome and easy it is to use. You can check out the screenshots if you don't already have an account with us.

Try it out and let us know what you think by posting here in the comments!

There have been a few minor updates made today. The first and most obvious update to our members is the re-organization of the navigation structure when you log in. Now, all the helpful tools are placed in a "Tools" link and are no longer in "Settings."

The links that now reside in "Tools" are Checkbot, Reminders, Spending Limits, Scratch Pad, Importing Records and Exporting Records. Breaking these away from Settings and putting them in Tools is an obvious decision. In the Settings menu you'll find, strangely enough, the settings that will help you manage your ClearCheckbook.com account.

In addition to the navigation structure update, CheckBot has also been updated. You can now transfer money from one account to another with Checkbot. The text you need to type in to make a transfer is located in the CheckBot Manager (which is now in Tools -> Manage Checkbot).

We're in the process of conducting some major updates to the code that runs ClearCheckbook.com in an effort to make things smoother and faster for everyone. Unfortunately, the updates we're making can cause some unwelcome side-effects such as seeing PHP warnings or errors. If you come across any of these please report it ASAP with the contact us form at the bottom of the page.

Here are a few of the things the updates are addressing:

1) You can now log in with a "Keep me logged in" option. By default from now on when you log in, you will be logged out when you close the browser. If you would like to stay logged in even after you close the browser, click the "Stay logged in" check box under the login form. This is something people have been requesting for a while and it's now in place.

2) Anti-caching measures. More recently a lot of people have been sending us messages saying that this or that isn't working properly. 95% of the time this is due to your browser "caching" the pages. (Read more about caching here.) Generally what you can do to alleviate this is to force your browser to refresh and clear out the cache (or Temporary Files as Internet Explorer calls it). If you ever experience something not updating, try refreshing the page a few times. If it still doesn't work, clear out your cache and try again. If that fails, contact us and let us know.

The Anti-caching measures we put in place today should help reduce that significantly, but dealing with issues like this isn't an exact science and there are always exceptions to the rule.

3) The third big thing we've been working on is the new way to handle Reports. It seems the script that gets run each night isn't behaving properly and is stopping before it creates all the reports. We're debating the idea of whether or not to even run the script at night but rather let you, the users, click a button whenever you want your reports to update and it will update only yours. This is the method that's in place right now and we will probably stick with this until we can optimize the report building code a little more.

To sum things up, a lot has been going on behind the scenes the last couple of days. Everything we're doing is to make things better for you, the user. If you notice any errors or things that don't work, please report it immediately using the contact form at the bottom of every page.

Many people, as well as I, had noted that the reports page was loading extremely slow each time you tried to load the page. Part of this long load time is that there are over 90,000 entries in ClearCheckbook and it had to crunch through all of those when generating the reports.

What happens now is that each night (morning) at around 1:30PST a script is run that generates all the reports and saves them as a static file. This static file is then loaded whenever you access the page.

Within the next couple of days you will have the ability to re-generate your reports page whenever you would like. This will create a new static page that will be loaded the next time you access your reports.

Update: January 8, 2007
After the reports are generated tonight, you will have the ability to rebuild the reports whenever you would like.

There was a bug with CheckBot that was recently fixed. The problem was occurring when some people used text messages to update their accounts. They were getting flooded with 6 or 7 text messages after they would send their message off.

The reason this was happening is that some cell phones were sending additional messages to CheckBot and CheckBot was in return responding with a message saying it didn't understand the last message.

For some reason, some cellphone service providers find it necessary to send several messages saying "This was sent with a text message. You can respond and I'll get a text message in response." The messages varied, but the result was the same.

The fix was easy, we simply told CheckBot not to respond to any message it didn't understand that were over 10 characters long. For those of you who had experienced this problem, please try again and let us know if that fixed the issue.