Part 2 of taking a look at Trip Boss features, budgeting for your food

OK, onto my second editorial on thoughts on Trip Boss and I'm going to take a look at how Trip Boss allows me to make note of food costs. It's always good for obviously keeping on track of your expenses and I will come onto this further on, but let me show you how we can keep track.

Selecting the Meals field within Trip Boss

By selecting the meals tab at the top of the screen you are met with the above screenshot, you have a number of fields in which to enter your details, now remember that the fields are all optional, you can add as much or as little information as you wish. I like the notes field at the bottom of the screen this allows me to enter anything I want about that particular meal event, maybe I can add what I eat, service experience or even who I was with that particular visit, I can also give my restaurant a rating should I wish dependable of course on meal and service. I can also add the address details, and these will be permanently bookmarked for the particular restaurant again good for future reference. So lets say I have completed the requirements and I have made note of a particular event, in this case we will say breakfast, the most important meal of the day some may say.

Adding restaurant details for future reference [should you wish to]

Here you can see that I have filled the details in for breakfast I had and saved the record. You can see that I have given Bonbonniere's a five star rating due to both service and food, I have the address details saved, I know where it is [although in reality I do know where the diner is because I have been going there for years and it's a great place to eat for those that visit the city] Now the good thing about entering the background details of the eating establishment is that it will always be saved for future reference including as I mentioned the address details. Now you may not want to go as far as entering each restaurant or diner that you go to and thats fine, you can just enter "Restaurant" or whatever the establishment is, so Trip Boss makes it very simple, very easy to work with.

Adding food expenses

OK, so now you want to keep track of how much your spending whilst eating out. This maybe good for work expences or if your taking your family away you may wish to track at how much your spending and again I'll show you in a couple of minutes at how Trip Boss really does help you plan your financial budget when traveling. So as you can see I have entered the Meal Type in the relevant field and here we have added that it's a breakfast meal and that's pretty easy, you can obviously improvise and add diner or whatever the meal type it is, and remember Trip Boss makes it easy and allows you to edit all these type of prefixes which makes it even more customisable. The eating establishment was Bonbonniere's, again I have selected it, if you remember I have added all the relevant details for the restaurant and again remember you can add as much or as little detail it's up to you. The cost of the breakfast, well that was $9.26, notice that I can filter whatever the currency so in this case it's $ but again you can change to whatever the currency. I then have my rating and I can add notes as mentioned earlier. Now I forgot to add see at the top of the page it shows "When" obviously this is the date you had the meal and allows me to even add the time, now I think this is a neat add on because I can go back should I want to and see how lazy I actually was and at what time I stumbled for breakfast and as you can see this Friday was not a bad day I had breakfast at 10:30am and believe me that's quite early for me :-).

So we have entered all the relevant information into the Meals field and again, you do not need to add as much information as I have it's entirely up to you.

Adding another meal

OK, so obviously you'll have other meals and I wanted to show you how I have used the notes field and this particular record of a evening meal shows that I have entered all the details into the meals field as I did for the last record and this time it's an evening meal, so you can see the date and time at 9:25pm, oh and notice I can add the timezone and with it being NYC it's ET and my meal record shows this. Now onto the meal it was a five star service which it normally is at Danube and the meal cost which was paid by VISA and you can see I have this option under the payment field, again notice how Trip Boss is so customisable. Now in the "Notes" field I have added that the meal was for two, I can in fact add anything I wish here in this field and thats the great thing with having a notes field.

Working out the expenses

So were spending all this money, is anyone controlling our budget? Well thankfully the Budget field allows me to control just how much money I have left. Now lets take the following scenario into. Say for example I take $6000 with me for a few days to NYC we can see that where I have the total field close to the top of the page. Now this is the clever trick, Trip Boss has remembered how much you have spent on your meals and you can see for breakfast and dinner I have spent in total $73 which you can see under the "Spent" field and look further down the page, under food it shows that you have spent in total $73. You do not have to add the details yourself, Trip Boss has added it all automatically, again, ease of use. So with this in mind Trip Boss has calculated that I have $5927 left so there is enough for another meal or two.

Lastly if I click on say Food, it opens a screen which breaks down money spend on Breakfast, Lunch etc, again very useful as the screenshot above shows.

This forthcoming week I will be looking at it looks at other aspects of Trip Boss and how it can assist. In the meantime you can get TripBoss from Creative Algorithms where a free trial of the program is available. It retails for the great price of $34.95 and as I am sure you will see as the week goes by it's certainly worth the money and more.