Ideas

Complexity and nature of task as well as preferences determine which money management software one uses. Another choice is installing such software in own computer or alternatively using it over the internet.

The simplest usage for money management software is a calculator, which is often available on the Internet. It is used for bigger purchases like for a car and house loan. Sallie Mae offers them for students to plan and to be aware of monthly repayments. Mostly calculators are used as consumer and business tools often for one time purpose.

Spreadsheets also make calculators and are used as personal tools to plan and manage a debt or investment with varying details. Spreadsheets like calculators can be used for “what if scenarios” (changing numbers for desired output, which software calculates). With a spreadsheet one can track available money and investments, even its risks, weekly, monthly and yearly or plan savings and budget incoming money and expenses. One can build own spreadsheets with software like Excel, download ready ones from the Internet or just use one on the Internet. For example Google provides software to build spreadsheets for any purposes without own such software. Spreadsheets are good and simple at focusing on something without involving unnecessary things. Goals like getting out of debt can be tracked using spreadsheets. More complex tasks like tracking money coming in and out are possible in small volume, but bigger volumes become too tedious when entering manually.

Own personal financial software in own computer makes it easier to manage monetary tasks. A user acquiring such software may think that some features are unnecessary, but then some of them prove to be nice to have like reports in graphs. Software uses information from banks, credit cards etc. and categories of spending, investments, credits etc. It also provides easy ways to find specific data by name, by category or by certain time. Having it in own computer can work together with online banking. Many banks allow downloading transactions directly into customers’ computer especially into Quicken. And banks’ online bill paying together with own software can make paying bills easy with payments scheduled ahead of time for one or repeat payments. Also bank account reconciliations can be done using money management software, which use may even provide data to tax return software. The oldest and most used money management software is Quicken from Intel with many features. But there are many others like Moneydance, AceMoney etc. There is even something for Macintosh like Quicken for Mac and iBank4.

Money management software comes also as online service like Quicken Online and Mint, which ware touted having best online money managing software. Now they have joined together and have many users with more people are joining in. Using them is free of charges. There is also Bufter similar to Mint and Quicken with free service. The main advantage is having a person’s all financial information in one place. A user can see at once all monetary matters: accounts from banks and credit cards, loans, investments, budgets etc. Besides these online services there are fee based specialized ones like serious investors may use specific software online or offline to keep better track of investment performances. And there are Turbo Tax and Tax Cut online and offline for tax returns.