Personal finance software can be used to track spending, create budgets, and plan for future expenses. Some software differs by feature support, software code and development transparency, mobile app features, import methods, Monetization model, privacy and data storage practices.
Risks[edit]
The use of expense tracking, budgeting, and other personal finance software carries some risk, most notably is due to the disclosure of a username, password, or other account credentials used to automatically synchronize banking information with an expense tracking application. Another significant area of risk is due to sensitive personal information that is stored anytime data is digitized. This risk may be compounded based on the security the software vendor has implemented as well as the availability of the data and where specifically it is stored (online or a local application). An often overlooked form of risk is due to the monetization model and privacy practices of the vendor or software provider, whether the application is 'free' or fee based. Open source software is one way of potentially minimizing the risks of privacy and monetization related risks of data exposure.
The following is a list of personal financial management software. The first section is devoted to free and open-source software, and the second is for proprietary software.
Free and open-source personal financial management software[edit]
Proprietary personal financial management vendors and software[edit]
See also[edit]References[edit]Personal Finance Software Windows 10
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_personal_finance_software&oldid=899031239'
Integrated with QuickBooks Online and Xero, suitable for small to medium businesses in retail, wholesale, manufacturing, food production sectors which have requirements to manage inventory levels. Solution covers the entire business cycle in inventory management. Shopify, Magento, Amazon and eBay retailers integrate DEAR Systems for more than just managing their inventories. DEAR Inventory provides features that give you information you need to manage costs and maximize profitability. Learn more about DEAR Systems
Suitable for businesses in retail, wholesale, manufacturing, food production sectors which have requirements to manage inventory levels Learn more about DEAR Systems
Integrated with QuickBooks Online and Xero, suitable for small to medium businesses in retail, wholesale, manufacturing, food production sectors which have requirements to manage inventory levels. Solution covers the entire business cycle in inventory management. Shopify, Magento, Amazon and eBay retailers integrate DEAR Systems for more than just managing their inventories. DEAR Inventory provides features that give you information you need to manage costs and maximize profitability.
Table of Contents
Managing money, sticking to a budget, and even handling investment decisions are easier than ever before, given the plethora of personal finance apps out there.
But not every mobile money management tool is worth downloading. You can take some of the guesswork out of digitizing your finances with this list of the top personal finance apps of 2019. Each of the eight is designated the 'best' for a particular purpose, although several fulfill more than one aim.
While this list is made up of primarily budgeting apps, if you're more interested in making investments for your future, Investopedia's list of best investment apps is where you will find apps that are designed for investing in stocks and other assets.
Best Money Management App: Mint
Hands down, the free Mint app from Intuit Inc. (INTU)—the company behind QuickBooks and TurboTax—is an effective all-in-one resource for creating a budget, tracking your spending, and getting smart about your money. You can connect all your bank and credit card accounts, as well as all your monthly bills, so all your finances are in one convenient place.
Mint lets you know when bills are due, what you owe, and what you can afford to pay (based on your available funds). The app can also send you payment reminders or warn you if you're approaching budget limits. Based on your habits, Mint even gives you specific advice to gain more control over your spending. The free credit score is a nice bonus, too.
Special features: Shows your real-time credit score
This app is for you if: You want to know how much money you have at any given time across multiple accounts and cards.
Mint is currently only available in the U.S. and Canada. The app Emma is the U.K. alternative.
Best Debt App: You Need a Budget
You Need a Budget (YNAB) is unlike any other budgeting app you've used before. YNAB helps you stop living paycheck to paycheck, pay down debt, and 'roll with the punches' if something unexpected comes up. It's built around a fairly simple principle: Every dollar has a 'job' in your personal budget, be it for investment, for debt repayment, or to cover living expenses.
You Need a Budget doesn't let you create budgets around money you don't have; it forces you to live within your actual income. If you get off track (and who doesn't occasionally?), YNAB helps you see what you need to do differently to balance your budget. The built-in 'accountability partner' keeps you on your toes. Although users pay a monthly or annual fee for YNAB, many feel the service and support are worth it. Online classes with a live instructor for Q&A to help you learn budgeting basics are included. In fact, YNAB is so effective that the average user pays off $500 in debt the first month. If nothing else, the financial commitment encourages you to use the app.
Special features: Not only can you set up weekly/monthly budgets (all personal finance apps do that) but you can also set up budgets or individual projects, like 'Christmas gifts.'
This app is for you if: Every other attempt you've made to get your budget in check has left you frustrated and hopeless.
Best Tracking Expenses App: Wally
If you're the sort of person who'd love to be as organized with tracking your personal expenses as you are with filing your professional expense reports, you'll love the totally free Wally app. Instead of manually logging your expenses at the end of the day (or week or month), Wally lets you take a photo of your receipts. And if you use geo-location on your device, it even fills in that info, saving you several steps.
Wally is a clean, streamlined app that's extremely convenient and easy to use. It's a great choice if you like more insight into where your money is going.
Special features: You can take a photo of your receipts instead of manually entering numbers. Less typing equals fewer, fat-fingered errors.
This app is for you if: Your previous attempts to track expenses were abandoned within a month because you hated entering them.
Best App for Easy Saving: Acorns
Want to harness the benefits of automating good financial behavior? If that sounds complicated, the Acorns app decidedly isn't. Basically, every time you make a purchase with a card, you've connected to the app, Acorns rounds it up to the next highest dollar and automatically invests the difference in a portfolio of low-cost exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that you select based on your risk preference.
Acorns put your pocket change to work in an utterly painless way; users say that they never notice the difference. Wouldn't you love to find an extra $300 or $500 or even $1,500 in your investment account each year?
Acorns is free to college students, and pricing starts at just $1 per month for pretty much everyone else.
Special features: You can set up your Acorn app to automatically invest your savings without knowing about it.
This app is for you if: You have never owned a share of stock because you thought you didn't have enough money to invest.
Best Cryptocurrency App: Coinbase
A digital currency exchange platform, Coinbase allows you to trade most of the majors—Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Litecoin—and plans to add further assets in the near future. The app is a stripped-down version of the desktop version, and its simple interface makes it even easier to use.
Once you verify for your identity (by uploading your passport or other personal documents), you can access spending limits of $25,000 per day.
Special features: You can set up price alerts in advance so that you know when your target sell/buy price has been met.
This app is for you if: You want to get started buying and selling cryptocurrency or sending it to friends.
Best Investing App: Robinhood
Robinhood is a game-changing investing app with a very unique and unbeatable feature: Transactions are free for stocks, ETFs (some 2,000 of them), options, and American depository receipts (ADRs). The app makes money by upselling premium services like margin trading and payment for order flow. It's also one of the very first personal investing apps to offer Bitcoin trading capabilities. Along with no commissions, there are no account minimum or maintenance fees.
Special features: 'Cards' appear on your screen to give you real-time news alerts and market information. They sound intrusive but they're actually helpful, and you can customize them or opt out altogether.
This app is for you if: You like free stuff and you're brand new to investing.
Best App for Freelancers: Tycoon
Tycoon was founded by supermodel Jess Perez, whose portfolio includes posing for Victoria's Secret and Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition. Perez noticed that models, like many freelancers, were often paid very late for their work, sometimes months or even years after the contractually required payment period. And it's hard for freelancers to keep track of multiple projects, especially since they're usually in the middle of one when another comes in.
Though popular with those in the fashion industry (photographers, stylists, etc.), Tycoon can be valuable for any self-employed person. It lets you standardize the details of a gig, put in a timetable for it, and keep track of payments that have come in, are scheduled to come in, or that are past due—your own little balance sheet, so to speak. It also makes it easy to see, at a glance, which clients have not paid you yet.
Special features: Tycoon App is catered to a freelancer's special needs, such as calculating take-home pay (minus taxes and agent commission) so you can decide whether or not to even accept a gig.
This app is for you if: You want to decide whether it's worth it for you to take a certain job. Time, after all, is money.
Best Cost-Splitting App: Venmo
Venmo was acquired by Paypal in 2013 for $800 million. The app is similar to PayPal, but, in the words of the official site, 'is unique in that Venmo allows users to share and like payments and purchases through a social feed. The service is popular with the millennial generation.'
If you want someone to pay you, you send them your personal QR code so they can add you as a recipient. The limit for transactions is $299.99 in a given week. If you set up for authorized merchants payments, your limit for sending funds is $2,999.99 weekly.
Special features: If you choose, you can share your transactions with your friends or even the whole Venmo-using world.
This app is for you if: You are the type of person to share your Fitbit running data on your social media feed.
(Sheila Olson contributed to this piece)
Get Your Financial House in Order
Gone are the days when you could tell how much money you had by looking in your wallet or at your checkbook balance. These days, many people only carry debit and credit cards—no cash. You find your checking account balance or check stock prices by reaching for your smartphone.
But how easy is it to discover how much money you've spent on lattes, gas, or work clothes this month? Do you know what the car dealer is going to learn about your credit history when you go in to buy a new vehicle? If you're a self-employed worker, how fast can you find out whether you're on track with your income this month?
There are many websites that handle personal finance exceedingly well. We review five of the best here. Quicken, the granddaddy of all personal financial solutions, is now a hybrid solution. The software still resides on the desktop, but the 2018 and 2019 versions offer access to a website that contains Quicken's most often-used features and synchronizes its data with your own personal file. So, you can check in on your income, expenses, and investments on the go.
Critical Connections
Quicken's online companion app is the biggest recent news in the personal finance world. But all of the applications we reviewed have new features, and they share some common characteristics. Most of them support online connections to your financial institutions. That is, you can download cleared transactions and other account data from your banks, bank card providers, brokerages, and other financial institutions, and see all of it neatly displayed in registers in the applications. Typically, you only have to enter the credentials that you use to log into those financial sites, though you occasionally have to provide additional security information.
Once you've imported a batch of transactions, you can work with them in numerous ways. For example, they need to be categorized correctly as income (salary, freelance payment, and interest, for example) and expenses (food, mortgage, utilities, and so on). The personal finance sites guess at what an appropriate category might be, but you can always change it—and you can split transactions between different classifications. If you're conscientious about this, you'll see charts that tell you where you're spending your money. This information can also be helpful when tax preparation time rolls around.
Depending on which website you're using, you might be able to add tags to transactions. Ozark s01e02 eng sub. That way, you can search for those that are related in ways other than through their category assignments. You can add notes and attach files, too. If you bought something with cash, your bank wouldn't have a record of it. In those circumstances, you can create a transaction manually. CountAbout goes a step further, providing an additional set of tools that let you make recurring transactions (or flag them).
A Different Kind of Dashboard
Four of the five personal finance websites reviewed here have what's called a dashboard. It's basically each site's home page, or the first screen you see when you log in. Sometimes, the dashboard is the only screen you'll need to see, because it displays the information you most need when you're checking on your financial situation. You'll learn what all of your account balances are and perhaps any bills that are pending.
You'll see charts and graphs that tell you, for example, what your income is versus your spending, and how you're doing on your budget. You may be able to gauge your progress on any goals you've set and view your investment portfolio, with live prices if it's during the market day.
Basically, this overview shows you snippets of the detailed data that lies behind the numbers on this opening page. Click on a checking account balance in Mint, for example, and this link takes you to the account's register. Click on your credit score in Credit Karma, and you'll learn what contributes to it and how it's changed recently. So the dashboard on a personal finance website can either provide a quick look at your money situation or it can serve as a springboard to a deeper study of the numbers.
Budgets, Goals, and Bills
If you're a freelancer or sole proprietor, budgets can be challenging. You don't know for sure how much money you'll make in a given month like a W-2 employee does. Being conscientious about your finances includes trying to curb your spending so that it comes in below your income. Note: Freelancers and sole proprietors might find that a small business accounting website is a better fit.
The mechanics of creating a workable budget are much easier than the process of specifying your limits. Mint, for example, treats each category as a budget. You select one, choose a frequency for it (every month, etc.), and enter an amount. The site shows you how well you're adhering to each budget by displaying a series of colored horizontal bars that show where your spending is currently compared with your budgeted amount. Green means you're doing OK, and red means you've gone over your self-imposed limit. You can tweak each budget as you learn more about your spending habits by clicking up and down arrows.
Other applications, like Quicken, consider a budget to be a comprehensive table that contains all categories. The software also lets you view your budgets by a variety of time periods (monthly, annually, and so on).
Setting goals, like trying to establish an emergency fund, isn't rocket science. You specify the amount you're trying to save and your target date for achieving it, and the application tells you how much you have to save every month to achieve it. NerdWallet, for example, lets you link your goals to the appropriate spending account so your progress is automatically tracked. Quicken Deluxe includes additional planning tools that help you accelerate debt reduction, plan for taxes, and establish a comprehensive lifetime financial plan.
None of the sites we reviewed offer bill-paying tools, but some let you at least record bills and bill payments, because those can figure into your personal finance picture so significantly. Mint is especially good at this. You can set up a connection to online billers or enter offline bills automatically. The site alerts you when they're due to be paid and lets you record payments manually if they don't get downloaded as cleared transactions from your bank.
An Important Number
An excellent credit score is gold. Beyond helping you get approved for a credit card, mortgage, car loan, etc., it often helps minimize the interest rate you'll pay. So it's important to know not only what it is at any given time, but also to understand how it gets calculated and what you can do to improve it.
Credit Karma and NerdWallet, both free websites, can meet all of these critical needs. Credit Karma is especially comprehensive and efficient here. It pulls your score regularly from two of the three major bureaus, and gives you access to your credit reports.
One of the ways you can improve your credit score is to use financial products—credit cards, mortgages—that have attractive interest rates and other benefits, making it easier for you to pay off debt as quickly as possible. The three free websites we reviewed (Mint, Credit Karma, and NerdWallet) help pay for the services they provide by displaying ads for products that might appeal to you based on your credit profile. You can also browse marketplaces for additional candidates.
Of course, frequently cancelling credit cards to get new, different ones can affect your credit score. Still, it's good to learn about these suggested products so that when the time comes, you'll know what the best options are.
Other Considerations
You may only want to use a personal finance site for day-to-day income- and expense-management, budgeting, and goal setting. But financial sites like Quicken and Mint let you track all of your assets, including homes, vehicles, and investment holdings. If you keep your financial data updated, the applications keep a running tally that, when combined with your debt, give you your total net worth.
You probably don't need advanced tools when you're away from your computer or laptop. But when you're out spending money, it's good to know how much you have. All of the solutions we reviewed offer both Android apps and iOS apps. They don't have all of the features found on the browser-based or software versions, but you can at least check your account balances, view and add transactions, and see graphs illustrating numbers related to things like spending and cash flow. You may also be able to get your credit score and check the status of pending bills.
Are all of the applications reviewed easy to use? The short answer is yes. Credit Karma and Mint are the most user-friendly, incorporating state-of-the-art interfaces with can't-miss navigation tools. NerdWallet tries to blend editorial content on personal finance with credit score and limited income/expense-tracking tools; these dual purposes make the site somewhat confusing until you understand how the two co-exist. CountAbout is certainly easy enough to use, but its user interface looks outdated. And because Quicken has been around for so long and offers so much, its user experience is a little uneven. This blending of old and new content can be a little jarring when compared with a solution built from the ground up to live online.
Each of these personal finance solutions offers something the others don't. But their skill at delivering the tools consumers need, and the cost at which they offer them, varies widely. Mint has won our Editors' Choice before, and it does so again this time for free personal finance services. Quicken, on the other hand, wins the Editors' Choice for paid personal finance services. We'd absolutely send people first to Mint if they're considering online personal finance because of its usability, its thorough selection of tools, and the feedback it provides users who keep up their end of the bargain by visiting it regularly. And, of course, it's free.
If you're looking to keep your life further organized, you can also check out our roundup of the best to-do list apps.
Best Personal Finance Services Featured in This Roundup:
Today, in this post, we will take a look at some of the free finance software for personal & home use, as well as accounting software for small, medium business – along with one for enterprises. All of these are free to use on your Windows computers.
Free Finance & Accounting Software1] Microsoft Money Plus Sunset
Microsoft Money Plus Sunset versions are replacements for expired versions of Microsoft Money Essentials, Deluxe, Premium, and Home and Business. It is available in two versions and can be installed stand-alone, or as an upgrade to an existing installation of Microsoft Money. Money Plus Deluxe Sunset is designed to replace Essentials, Deluxe and Premium and Money Plus Home & Business Sunset is designed to replace Home & Business.
2] GnuCash
GnuCash is a free accounting software for Small Business. If you run a business and are looking for good and free accounting software for small business, then GnuCash is perfect for you. It is a free and open source accounting software and comes with a double-entry book-keeping system.
3] HomeBank
HomeBank is a personal accounting software that is simple to use and has a user-friendly interface. The software lets you keep track of budgets, archives, assignments, payees, and accounts, very easily. There are multiple categories present in HomeBank such as credit card, asset, cash, bank, and liabilities.
3] Manager for Windows
Manager for Windows is free financial software for small business. It is capable of tracking all the income and expenses, and even maintaining a database of clients with sales records. It keeps a record of all your financial dealings, classifies, and summarizes all your business transactions which are financial, efficiently.
4] Money Manager Ex
Money Manager Ex is a third-party free personal finance software for Windows that you may want to check out. It helps you manage your finances easily. You can manage your personal as well as business finances with this application. It is free to use software. This open-source and cross-platform finance software creates an overview of your financial worth.
5] BS1 Enterprise Accounting freeware
The main modules that BS1 Enterprise Accounting freeware are – General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Inventory, Sales Analysis & Bank Reconciliation. The free version of BS1 Enterprise Accounting software has limited features but is still good enough for a single user.
6] Microsoft Money
Microsoft Money is a personal finance management software program from Microsoft. It has capabilities for viewing bank account balances, creating budgets, and tracking expenses, among other features. However, Microsoft Money was discontinued in 2009, and an alternative named Microsoft Money Plus Sunset mentioned above, was released in 2010, but it lacks some features that were provided by former version. It is not free, but since many still like to use it, we have included it. This post will show you how to use Microsoft Money on Windows 10.
7] Zipbooks
Zipbooks is a free online solution that fulfills all your needs in the billing process. You can carry out bookkeeping, invoicing, time tracking and more.
8] Manager Desktop Edition
Manager Desktop Edition is free accounting software for small business. It’s simple to use, and when it comes down to paying your taxes, it should remove a ton of stress from your mind.
Suggestions are most welcome.
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