Software to Help You Better Manage Money
Looking after your finances can be tough going for an individual and as a business, especially if you have a lot of different expenses to manage. If you fail to take the appropriate care with your money you can find yourself in perilous situations where you may be in debt and unable to pay for essentials.
To help you avoid situations like this, and stay financially healthy, there are a few pieces of technology you can get that can help you stay on top of your finances and better manage your money. Here are a few good pieces of software you can use for both your personal and business finance to help you prosper and achieve your financial goals when used alongside effective budgeting techniques.
Quicken
Quicken is a piece of personal finance software that has been around for over several decades, making it a very established piece of technology with a lot of experience and expertise. The software can be used to manage various aspects of your financial life, such as budget creation, setting saving goals, debt tracking as well as investment coaching to help you make your money go even further and to avoid getting into a situation where you may need to learn consumer protection law to help prevent debt lawsuits.
The software interacts with Microsoft Excel really well, meaning that you can export your files and manipulate your data on these two piece of software, allowing you to perform more functions and calculations to give you a more robust financial management experience.
Quicken’s most advanced feature is how you can use it to set up automatic bill paying, where it allows you to set up payments straight from the software. You can also use it to track the value of all your assets and calculate your net worth, which can also be good for businesses when trying to figure out what assets to sell to generate cash. Its functionality makes it a brilliant all rounder for either businesses or individuals.
Intuit Mint
Intuit is perhaps most famous for their Quickbooks application, which is great for businesses to manage their payroll and HR function, however, for individuals and households, Mint is perhaps more appropriate. Mint is brilliant at budgeting, due to how it can track all your expenses and make it easier to see where your money is going. It can be really useful at pulling up either your debit or credit card information and analyzes areas where you can cut down to improve your finances.
Mint also has various tools to make you more accountable with your finances, as you can set alerts for stuff such as due dates and when you’re low on cash to deter you from spending to help you stay on track. These features help you from incurring late fees as well as overdrafts on your bank account, which can make a difficult financial situation even worse.
You can also create categories within your budget so that you can get a more detailed view on what your eating-out budget is like, or how what your travel expenses are like. This can then further allow you to see where you can cut back and make better budgeting decisions. Another brilliant thing about Mint is that it is free to download and use on most mobile devices, as well as desktops.
Mvelopes by Finicity
There’s a popular budgeting technique that people use that involves breaking down your budget and putting it away into envelopes. So, for example, a budget may be broken down into $100 on gas for a week, $200 on electricity, and $75 on groceries, and these budgets are put into their own little envelope. Then, when that specific budget is all spent up, that’s it. This approach helps you stay within your budget and limits overspending, and with mvelopes, this approach can now be done digitally on a phone or computer rather than with physical cash.
By setting financial goals and then adding your bank account as well as your income to the software, it will be able to create a budget for you and set up envelopes that can be helpful to keep you on track. The software will monitor how much you spend on each envelope and display how much you have left to help you stay on track. Any money you have left over can then either roll over to the next week’s budget or put into a saving account to help you generate more cash and improve your finances.
The software can be really handy and also pretty fun as it turns budgeting into a challenge. The software starts at $6 per month, with a more expensive version as well that includes some coaching options to instill better saving habits, but to find out if it’s for you, there’s also a 30-day free trial.
