The Founder of the Green Pig Software Corporation is Dr. Gerald Wagner. He is internationally recognized his leadership and success in developing financial planning software. Dr. Wagner is legendary in terms of designing and developing state of the art software. But his real “claim to fame” is designing and developing financial software that is easy to use. Most of the Fortune 1500 companies and hundreds of Universities and government agencies have been his customers. If interested check out www.geraldrwagner.com.
During the spring, 2009 semester while working with nonprofit organizations in his University course on financial planning, he became aware of the national crisis statistics relative to poor personal financial management practices. Forty four million Americans don’t know how their money is being spent. Double that number has no spending plan for the future.
He also became aware of the need for nonprofits to offer financial management support for those which they serve with emphasis on low income families. Putting the pieces together he realized that his success with corporate financial software could be used to build superior personal financial management software. Thus, the Green Pig was “born”. The iconic piggy bank suggests savings and of course the color green is good.
Starting from scratch but using years of lessons, the design of the Green Pig began. Guiding design principles included extreme intuitiveness and ease of use, non-intimidating for any user, “normal” looking and acting data input, powerful but fun budgeting, and game like abilities to visualize and play with data. The “game” is to find that combination of achievable expenses and income that will keep money balances positive (above zero) and savings growing according to plan. It also has to allow manual data input for those who don’t want their bank data moving around in cyberspace. Both are needed but the user should have the choice of one or both. It also has to allow for tracking the use of cash since a lot of people still use some cash.
The software will always be available for free to all nonprofits and those which they serve. The Green Pig itself is a nonprofit corporation. For profit corporations can offer the software as a part of their benefits packages for employees and customers. They can also brand the software on their own web site if they want to.
