Personal Finance software

[bdelgaud]

I am looking for Personal finance software. I am an accountant and enjoy using quickbooks. I use quickbooks and it works but is more geared for Business.

Many people will say quicken. I bought quicken and was very disapointed with it. The importing of transactions was always slow and wasted ore time than it helped me.

Any good options people would recommend? Mainly just looking to track income and expenses, credit cards and some assets like ira's

[kyoko]

I recently started using mint.com. It is developed by the same company of quickbooks. It pulls all your account information ( bank & CC, even investment) so you don't need to do any data entry. I still use my old fashion excel, but if you don't enter any transaction as you spend, it gets overwhelmed!
I find mint.com pretty convenient and easy to use. Plus it's free.
I know there are some other system out there, and I would also like to test them out.

[bdelgaud]

i have mint as well. tis good for suggestions and such. but can not reconcile the acounts and such like i like. i may just stick with quickbooks. Unless there is something better than quicken. Quickbooks works for me. just harder for IRA's but still doable

[JulieAlbright]

I've never found anything I like better than YNAB (You Need a Budget) for tracking expenses and income. Note however that the focus of YNAB is largely on your actual spending vs budget. You do see your account balances and you can reconcile accounts, that just isn't the primary purpose of the program.

YNAB isn't really geared for Investment Accounts at all, I use Mint.com to track those.

[humandraydel]

Have you looked into GnuCash? It's based on double-entry accounting so a lot of people don't like it but you might. Personally I love it, and it's free so the price is right!

[bdelgaud]

havent heard of gna cash. will look into it.


i like quickbooks for reconcling everyting and has set everything up nicely. just not perfect for investments

[phantom]

I'm also fan of GnuCash and definitely recommend it to people who don't get freaked out by double entry accounting. It has a lot of flexibility, which makes it very powerful, but that also gives it a steep learning curve. I played around with its reconciliation when I first started using it, and it worked, but eventually I decided that I don't like bothering to reconcile things. I am pretty satisfied with the way it handles tracking investments.

I actually like using GnuCash in combination with Mint. I like the budgeting tools in Mint a lot, and the fact that it lives online makes it easy to share with my husband. But, it isn't really built to handle future transactions, so it doesn't work for figuring out cash flow, and it has a bad habit of losing my data, so I don't like to depend on it for looking at things that happened in the past.

[kyoko]

But, it isn't really built to handle future transactions, so it doesn't work for figuring out cash flow, and it has a bad habit of losing my data, so I don't like to depend on it for looking at things that happened in the past.

That's exactly why I still use my old excel because it gives us a flexibility to work existing numbers with new numbers, such as future (expecting) transactions to figure out cash flow. If GnuCash helps on this and I can incorporate with mint, I would definitely want to take a look on GnuCash!

[humandraydel]

I'm also fan of GnuCash and definitely recommend it to people who don't get freaked out by double entry accounting.

I'll admit it freaked me out at first. But after it finally clicks, it actually makes perfect sense. In fact, anything other than double-entry makes NO sense!

[Kundan Lal Rana]

I am looking for Personal finance software. I am an accountant and enjoy using quickbooks. I use quickbooks and it works but is more geared for Business.

Many people will say quicken. I bought quicken and was very disapointed with it. The importing of transactions was always slow and wasted ore time than it helped me.

Any good options people would recommend? Mainly just looking to track income and expenses, credit cards and some assets like ira's

In this era of cloud, you can opt either for QuickBooks Online or Xero.

[johnt78]

There are dozens of money-management and tax-prep software programs on the market. Some are downloads or discs that are installed on your computer. Others are web-based and house your data online. Take an online tour or download a free trial version before making a purchase