EVALUATING FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
Quicken Software
VERDICT / Premier is our top pick for the best personal finance software for its easy-to-use platform, simplistic budgeting features and powerful investment
Intuit is famous for its money management software, and Quicken Premier sets the bar for finance software. You can sync your bank, credit card and investment accounts directly to Quicken so you never miss a transaction. You can quickly create a budget with spending limits and alerts to ensure you do not spend more than …show more content…
Quicken Premier offers a large number of helpful reports that you can save for your records or use in other programs. Report categories include banking, spending, comparison, investing and tax reports. The reports in these categories include cash flow, spending by payee, budget and income versus expense, among a large number of other choices. You can choose from a predetermined date range, such as month to date or year to date, or choose custom dates. Many reports are simple data and number reports, but some also provide visual representations of the data, like a bar or pie chart.
Personal Investing
If you own securities and trade stocks and other investment vehicles, Quicken Premier is the best choice for personal finance software. You can sync Quicken directly to your brokerage account to transfer balances and trade history and to manage your portfolio. The investment management tools and options it offers are better than with any other service we evaluated. This software provides analytics of your portfolio, such as risk versus return, and compares your portfolio to the market. …show more content…
With the apps, you can manage your accounts, add and edit transactions, adjust your budget, and monitor your expenses. Apps are available for Apple products, Android devices and Kindles.
When creating a budget, you can first schedule your paychecks out for the month so you have your base amount to work with. From there, you can budget out amounts for your expenses. In Mvelope 's terms, this is allotting amounts to your envelopes, and you can add or delete envelops, add limits, and copy budgets from month to month. You can further edit each envelope individually, selecting the name and category. You can choose to have a bill be monthly, periodically or an everyday expense. From this view, you can schedule out a whole year rather than just a few months.
This software is very much set up to keep track of synced accounts, so manually adding transactions is not as intuitive as it is with the best home finance software, but once you figure out the process, it is not difficult. If the transaction will put the envelope at a negative balance, you will be prompted as to how you wish to address the situation, either by funding the envelope or letting it go