Top 21 List of Financial Sotfware and Application for Efficient Money Management

Managing money is a lot of work. But with the help of technology, it is just a matter of inputing data. Here is a list of all the softwares and online applications that can assist you to keep track of your finance more efficiently.

1. Microsoft Money

MS Money is a robust, user-friendly personal finance program that includes features that allow you to manage your finances, budget, track your investments, bank online, and plan for your taxes. It is one of the most comprehensive software especially useful for those staying in USA.

Features:

• integrate all different currency
• balance your checkbook and cash flow
• customizable charts
• manage taxes
• create budget
• manage investment
• PDA synchronization

Price: $19.99 – $59.99

2. Quicken

Like MS Money, Quicken helps you with your banking, investing, taxes, financial planning, budgeting, and more. You can pay bills online, balance your checkbook and reconcile your bank statement quickly and painlessly. A variety of reports and graphs show you how you spent your money and compares your actual expenses to your budget.

Features:

• money management
• Bring your online accounts — including checking, savings and credit cards– together all in one place.
• See a monthly calendar of your paychecks, bills and expenses to help you schedule bills, set reminders and — most importantly — help avoid late fees.
• Mark expenses as tax deductible throughout the year, so you have everything ready come tax time.
• import PayPal account transactions
• PDA synchronization

Price: $29.99 – $99.99

3. Excel or Google Spreadsheets

I had compiled a list of free excel spreadsheet before. You can also customize or design your own spreadsheet. To save time, I suggest that you download this free spreadsheet and modify it to suit your needs.

• ExcelGeek – Monthly Spending Plan
• Free Spreadsheet provided at Office Online
• Excel Spending Plan

Features:

• cash flow spreadsheet
• net worth tracking
• easy customization, as long as you know how to operate Microsoft Excel

Price: FREE (although most of them are free, some complicated spreadsheets are sold with an affordable price)

4. Expensr

Expensr is another web-based personal finance app that lets you enter your income and expense, and then gives you analysis about your money management habit.

Features:

• create budgets
• track spending
• project your spending
• can import bank account statements in .ofx, .qfx, and .csv. format
• pie chart and timeline chart illustration
• social network – allow you to tag your profile and compare it with others

Price: FREE

5. Gnu Cash

GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports.

Special Features:

• double-entry accounting
• stock/mutual fund/bond accounts
• QIF/OFX/HBCI Import, Transaction Matching
• Financial Calculations
• Small-Business Accounting

Price: FREE

6. Wesabe

Wesabe is a community site that makes managing your money easy. Enjoy secure access to all your accounts, painless tools for taking control of your money and reaching your goals, and members’ tips and discussions to help you find the best values
Features:

Special features:

• tag your spending
• compare your spending with other people using the similar tags

Price: FREE

7. Money Trackin

Moneytrackin’ is a free online webapp that allows you to track all your expenses and income easily and without effort, thus allowing you to have a clear view of your financial situation. It intends to be a simple yet powerful online budget management tool.

Special features:

• Track your money easily from everywhere. Import your data from your bank or another financial software.
• Take part in the community by entering your money saving tips or your favourite places for best bargains.
• Learn new ways to save money with worldwide tips relevant to your money usage and location.
• Sharing budgets and collaborative working of many people together on the same account
• Public API to allow the integration with third party applications

Price: FREE

8. AceMoney

AceMoney Lite is a freeware personal finance manager. It has all the features of its big brother except multiple accounts management. As AceMoney, AceMoney Lite helps people organize and manage their personal finances quickly and easily.

Special features:

• AceMoney automates input of orders coming from PayPal, RegNow, RegSoft, SWReg and Plimus.
• provides a loan calculator to plan debt payments and a professional mortgage calculator to estimate future morgage payments if you are planning to purchase real estate.
• Enjoy the security of password protection of every file, scheduled backups and many other features without having any experience in accounting!
• Download and import information from on-line banks in QIF and OFX formats. If you run a small business, export to HTML, Text, or CSV formats to generate statements or perform complex statistical analysis.
• The software supports more than 150 different currencies and automatically downloads their exchange rates from Internet.

Price: Free (lite version)

9. Yodlee

Yodlee MoneyCenter – an integrated suite of applications designed to make managing finances online a true breeze for mainstream consumers who want a personalized, safe and convenient way to be more in control of their finances. It’s the next generation of online banking that consumers can expect from their trusted financial institutions.

Price:FREE

10. Banzaiway

The Banzai Way is an entirely new approach to controlling your spending.

Special features:

• “Jar” features, similar to budgeting but in a wicked way
• real live Banzai Coach support. Subscriber will get a personal money coach.

Price: $4.95/month

11. Electric CheckBook

Electric CheckBook (ECB) is an online application created by New Leaders in 48 hours during the Rails Rumble 2007. YES! You heard me right that the application is coded and all completed in 48 hours only, by a team of programmers. What you can do with ECB is pretty amazing though.

Features:

• Put your accounts together – You can access your account ledgers from any web browser
• Record Payments, Deposits and Transfer – Using their simple transaction form you can enter all the details about a transaction. How much was spent on what and when. Auto-fill payees and categories make it even faster to enter a new transaction.
• Take Control of Your Credit – Keeping track of credit cards can be a hassle. With Electric CheckBook you can set-up a ledger for every credit card, loan payment or line of credit you have.
• Track Cash Account – You can track cash accounts without the need of a bank account.
• Share CheckBooks with Family and Friends – You can share any CheckBook with a Group by simply inviting members. Set the accounts they have access to. Your private accounts are never shared with anyone to keep your sensitive information secure. This is a great feature for married couples to share accounts.

Price: FREE

12. Mint

Mint is a modern, powerful, easy and secure web-based solution for managing your finances. And it’s free. You register anonymously using any valid email address, and then add the log-in information for the online bank, credit union and credit card accounts you want to consolidate in Mint.

Feature:

• Mint automatically updates your banking and credit card transactions, eliminating the possibility of forgetting to enter transactions.
• Mint automatically categorizes transactions as they are downloaded.
• Label transactions to be able to quickly identify expenses that are related to work, hobbies, meals out, etc.
• View all banking and credit card transactions and account balances side by side.
• Mint works with 3,000 U.S. banks and credit card companies.
• Compares cash and debt for quick overall financial reporting, and Mint offers spending histories.
• Email and SMS alerts let you know about low balances, large purchases and other financial activities in your accounts.
• Security: firewalls, encryption and authentication procedures protect your personal finance data.
• Mint tells about banking and credit card deals and money-saving products and services you could benefit from using. This information is kept out of the way under the Ways to Save tab.

Price: FREE

13. Moneydance

Moneydance offers a checkbook-type interface, prints checks, reconciles your bank account, tracks your expenditures, and prints a variety of reports. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that MS Money and Quicken offer, but if you’re looking for simple and direct, you might consider this as an alternative.

Features:

• online banking
• manage your budget
• stay on schedule
• track your portfolio
• graphing and reporting
• import from Quicken and Money
• Protect your privacy
• international support
• cross-platform compatibility
• standards-based reliability

Price: $29.95

14. MySpendingPlan

MySpendingPlan.com is a free secure online personal finance budgeting software. It presents a modern version of the tried and true
“envelope system” to fit today’s lifestyle and home budgets. It’s Auto-Assign Budget technology will recommend a future budget by examining your past and present spending habits and matching them with your income.

Special features:

• print free coupons
• get bill due and task reminders by email
• track saving goals
• customizable “My Big Picture” personal planning portal
• “envelop system” – get a separate envelope for different household expenses such as housing, food, travel, etc., allocate expenses to the different categories according to one’s income, put the allocated money in its respective envelope, and
  then use the money from a particular envelope to pay the corresponding bills. online and in-store discounts and deals
• budget wedding planning
• find cheap gas

15. ClearCheckBook

ClearCheckbook was originally created by Brandon O’Brien in June 2005 as an alternative to using excel to keep track of all purchases and deposits. There are over 11,000 members signed up to use this application.

Special features:

• See all transactions, overall balances, reminders and notices on one page in ClearCheckbook.
• Supports account transfers and split transactions.
• Search transactions by date, keyword, account or category.
• Track your spending in ClearCheckbook with charts, graphs and spending vs. saving for all accounts.
• Security: you do not enter your account numbers into ClearCheckbook.
• Reconcile accounts and use time-saving recurring transactions.
• Personal finance alerts and reminders arrive by email.
• Use CheckBot to update your account while on the go with AIM, ICQ, MSN / Windows Live, Google Talk and Yahoo! Messaging services.

Price: Free

16. Budget Tracker

BudgetTracker, Inc. is a financial money management site which allows users to access their data from any internet connection via a Personal Computer or Cellular Phone.

Special features:

• Keep your Bills, Income, Tasks, Meetings or other reminders stored in your personal calendar.
• Transfer Funds and Save I Owe You’s between friends
• Track and manage your Bills and have them emailed, or sent to your mobile phone.

Price: FREE

17. Buxfer

Buxfer is another online web app similar to Expensr and Wesabe.

Special features:

• keep track of who owes you money
• send money online using Amazon payments
• access Buxfer on the mobile phone
• can use the Buxfer Groups to simplify shared finances

Price: FREE

18. Budget Pulse

BudgetPulse is developed by a small team of experienced professionals in interactive and fresh web 2.0 outlook.

Special features:

• view financial news from all major sites presented on one page

Price: Free

19. Pear Budget

PearBudget is a FREE budgeting program, written in Excel. It can be used by almost any spreadsheet program (Excel, Word, OpenOffice, etc.). Setting it up is a snap, and you can input your data during the commercial breaks of a single episode of your favorite show.

Price: Free

20. Mvelopes

Mvelopes Personal is an award-winning online home budgeting system that helps you look to the future and manage your spending accordingly. With Mvelopes you can quickly and easily create an online home budget, track all your spending, and always know exactly how much you have left to spend.

Price: Free Trial

21. Billster

Billster is a totally free online application developed to organise your personal and shared expenses.

Special features:

• shared bills : record and report on your personal and group expenses
• Send reminders, either automatically or fired off by you, whenever you want to remind people who owe you money or to remind yourself about a payment
• Automatically email you with a summary of the expenses you’ve put through billster

Price: Free

References:
6 Great Free Alternatives to Quicken & MS Money | zen habits | simple productivity
Personal Finance Software Review 2008
10 Online Budget Tools | The Dough Roller