The ribbel concept builds on three  pillars.

These are economics, time and statistics.


For the first pillar - economics - a concept is applied, called "balance of trade". In microeconomics, balance of trade is the difference between the momentary value of income and expense.
As income, you probalby think of your salary. You may have further income. Money on a bank account sometimes bears interest, which is payed back to you at the end of a year. You have to pay taxes on that, but what is left, is actually income. Further income can be money that you get from selling items on ebay or even Christmas presents in form of money from aunt Gertrud.
The category of expenses include everything that decreases you available money. You have to pay rent, pay the telefon costs, buy food, pay all sorts of bills and so forth. You get the picture.

In order to do a "balance of trade" in microeconomics, what one does is basically to write down all sorts of income on the left side of a sheet of paper and all the expenses on the right side of that same sheet. What you have now is an overview in two columns.
Sum up the values in each column, so that you get an accumulated value for income and one for expense.

Look closer on the values you got.
If you have a larger value on expense, than on income, you are in trouble. Probably not in short term, but if this picture keeps for months and months to come, you will probably be out of money sooner or later.
On the other hand, if your expenses are smaller than your income, this means that you have more money available, than you are in need of. This is an personal advantage, because you can use that additional money to build up a safety-pillow for the lean years.


We add another pillar to ribbel.net, which will life aside the balance of trade, or balance economy as it is called sometimes. Time.
Creating that balance table, you are bound to the values you use. The question is, in what perspective of time you were thinking, when writing these values down. Was it thought to be monthly? Have you been writing for a yearly basis?
Adding the aspect of time as we did with ribbel.net, there actually is no boundary when a months ends. This is a paradox. We have added the pillar of time and things get much easier, as we do not have to think about the problem of time frames any more.
On ribbel.net, one is entering income and expense on a continuous basis, where the minimal step is one day. This is why we adapted a calender like structure on ribbel.net. Each time you spend money, you enter it that day, you are spending it. Each time you get money from some source seen as income, you enter it that day it is available to you.
The advantage in that concept lies in the daily accurate balance economy and the simlplification of the time frame problem.


For our purpose, two pillars are not enough !
Another one had to be added, to make that system working smoothly in daily life. Statistics.
Statistics is nothing more than collecting values which represent a certain situation and try to draw conclusions from the structure of your data.
For the ribbel concept, statistics is used for income/expense that cannot be defined exactly. The only thing you have is a rough idea about your money transfered. One example is your salary. Months have a different amount of working days. You cannot say exactly, what your company is paying you at the end of each and every month. What you do know, is a rough estimation about what should be payed. Another example are expenses that you have on a frequent basis, but with a different amount. Food. Every now and then you are visiting the supermarket to buy food. You do not know exaclty how much you buy food for, but you have a rough estimation how much it can be every month. A third example, to keep everyone on trail. Vehicles. For any type of vehicle you have expenses. These include gasoline/electricity to power them plus taxes and insurance. You are certain that you have these expenses. You are on the other hand not sure about its exact size. What you can do, is write down a rough estimation and go from there.
These estimations will help you to plan your financial situation.
On ribbel.net you are able to meet income and expenses which you only know with rough estimations, by entering them in the calender as such. The system is taking care about handling it such that your estimation is as exact as possible. You are able to correct these values if needed, as you are able to look backwards and inspect the size from previous months.
As a side note, it is worth to mention that the counter part of estimated values are fixed income/expenses such as the rent for your appartment or car, fixed credit costs for your house or the daily newspaper that you are reading. Fixed income/expenses are handled similar, just by entering in the calender on ribbel.net. This makes the handling of the user interface very comfortable and easy.

The threefold concept is very powerfull and is able to give you an excellent tool at hand to control your economy and not be controlled by it.

The ribbel concept is extended with a user friendly interface.
Typing numbers into spread sheet is either time consuming or boring. In the worst case, its both. Boring activities are to be kept to a minimum. Therefor, the organisation of your private economy has to be without boring spread sheets and in less than 15 seconds per ribbel session, e.g. while you are waiting for your emails to be downloaded. 

All you have to do during a ribbel session is to note a new income or expence. The rest is handled by the system which will keep you updated about your financial situation. Optionally via email and even SMS.

What if you forgot to update your data?
Daily life is keeping you busy so that you do not have a single minute, to visit your planing system here at ribbel.net and keep it updated. That is not a problem at all. The reason can be split in two views.
1) Before you entered that period, where you are very busy, you took your time and entered all expenses, months in advance. Which means that the system, to a certain degree, already is up to date, even you did not visit it for changes.
2) After a long term period where you had no actual chance to enter ribbel.net, you are visiting it again, to continue using it. The first thing you do is to enter a single amount on the day you reentered ribbel.net, which levels your account and brings everything up to date. We call it balancing your account. From there, continue using ribbel.net as usual.


Among other, your benefits are the possibility to take a look at your future economy. Will you be able to buy these expensive shoes today and manage the months to come? Can you put left over money on a bank account which bears high interest?

Use ribbel.net to stabelize your economy. SMS-Credits have just emerged and already belong to the past.