Money on Thread is a cool new freeware financial budgeting program which aims to make it easy to track your income and expenditure by running it all in a simple thread format down the page. Stuff you spend out is on the right and stuff you earn or take in is on the left. In the middle is your balance.

You get all sorts of instant feedback from this kind of approach, although it won’t help you budget for the future, since it’s a present moment snapshot. You do get lots of useful categories to drop things into though, which means you can track what’s sucking up your cash, and there’s also a pretty simple custom report maker for designing a report which fits your needs. Definitely worth a look (but beware quirky Java interface).