What are the best software tools for personal finance?
Mint.com—Easy solution to provide insight into finances. Pros: Cons: GnuCash—Great for the meticulous who want to know every detail of their finances. Pros: Cons: I like You Need A Budget (YNAB) Pros: Cons: Excel Pros: Cons: Intuit Quicken. Pros: Cons: I'm a big fan of buxfer.com I just switched (from the abandoned, but good MS Money) to Moneydance 2010 http://www.Mvelopes.com Mvelopes is envelope-style budgeting in an online application. I've tried all of the other applications and I choose to pay for this one for the following reasons: For Mac it's definitely iFinance. I use iBank for Mac to keep track of my expenses. I also use the iPhone version since they can sync over Wi-Fi and I can capture expenses right on the spot instead of trying to remember what I spent on when I turn on my laptop. KMyMoney Pros: Cons: For iPhone: iExpenseIt Money Manager Ex PROS: CONS Emergency Account Vault (Windows) I use it to store info about all of my accounts/assets in an encrypted document. It's more for keeping track of everything that is in your name than managing money. Good for situations when you need to quickly look up info about a specific account you own. For any android device you can try: Daily Expense Manager - to track your expenses and a host of other apps to suit your specific needs.
For double entry bookkeeping, personal or small business, GnuCash is very good. Exists for Mac Os. Another one I have seen mentioned used is Equity Feed. It had varies levels of the software depending on the markets you want and can provide level 2 quotes if select that option. http://stockcharts.com/ is also a great tool I see mentioned with lots of free stuff. Long time Quicken user, but I have Bootcamp on my Mac, and one reason is so I can run Quicken Windows. That's one solution. You didn't mention what version of the Mac OS you're running, but Bootcamp is one alternative if you have (or can purchase) a Windows license. Be advised, Bootcamp 4, which is available with OS 10.7 (Lion) and OS 10.8 (Mountain Lion), officially supports Windows 7 only. Quicken running under Bootcamp isn't perfect, but it's better than any Mac version, and Quicken 2013 has a mobile app that allows you to view your data & enter transactions via your mobile. The Mac Version of Quicken has been panned by users. I do use Windows for work-related stuff, so I have a reason for running Windows besides using Quicken. I've read that Intuit has a market share of more than 70% in the personal finance software sector, and at this point it seems pretty clear that they are not interested in pursuing a larger share via Mac users. So if we ever see a highly functional version of Quicken for the Mac OS, it won't be any time soon. I've not used other products, but there are many reviews out there which rank them, and some consistently come to the front. Top 10 Reviews Mac Personal Finance Software 2013; WeRockYourWeb Personal Finance Software Rankings includes many Web-based alternatives; Personally, I'm not real enthusiastic about posting my personal financial data on someone's Web site. I have nothing to hide, but I just can't get comfortable with cloud-based personal finance software providers that are combing through my data, Google-like, to generate revenue. Too, it seems an unnecessary risk giving a third party a list of all my account numbers, user names, and passwords. I know that information is out there, if one has the right sort of access, but to my way of thinking, using a cloud-based personal finance software application makes it more out there. "As your financial situation becomes more complex, it becomes increasingly more difficult to keep track of everything with a simple spreadsheet.  It is much easier to work with software that is specifically designed for personal finances. A good program will allow you to keep track of as many accounts as you want.  A great program will completely separate the different account balances (location of the money) from the budget category balances (purpose of the money).  Let me explain: When you set up the software, you will enter in all of your different bank accounts with their balances.  Perhaps you have three savings accounts and two checking accounts.  It doesn't matter.  When you are done entering those, the software will total them up, and the next job you have is assigning this money into different budget categories: your spending plan.  For example, you might put some of it into a grocery category, some into an entertainment category, some will be assigned to pay your next car insurance bill, and some will be an emergency fund.  (These categories are completely customizable, and your budget can be as broad or as detailed as you wish.)  When you deposit your paycheck, you assign that new income into budget categories as well.  It doesn't matter at this point which accounts your money are located in; the only thing that matters is that you own this money and you have access to it.  Now, you might want to use a certain account for a certain budget category, but you are not required to do so.  (For example, your grocery category money will probably be in your checking account, since you will be spending from it regularly.  Your emergency fund will hopefully be in an account that earns a little higher interest.) Once you take this approach, you might find you don't need as many bank accounts as you thought you did, because the software does the job of separating your money into different ""accounts"" for different purposes. I've written before about the different categories of personal finance software.  YNAB, Mvelopes, and EveryDollar are three examples of software that will take this approach of separating the concepts of the bank account and the budget category." I  found that  an application already exists which does virtually everything I want to do with a reasonable interface.  Its called My Personal Index.  It has allowed me  to look at my asset allocation all in one place. I'll have to enter: The features which solve my problems above include:  Note - This is related to an earlier post I made regarding dollar cost averaging and determining rate of returns.   (I finally got off my duff and did something about it) The short answer is that there are no great personal finance programs out there any more. In the past, I found Microsoft Money to be slick and feature rich but unfortunately it has been discontinued a few years ago.  Your choices now are Quicken and Mint along with the several open-source programs that have been listed by others. In the past, I found the open source programs to be both clunky and not feature-complete for my every day use. It's possible they have improved significantly since I had last looked at them. The biggest limitation I saw with them is weakness of integration with financial service providers (banks, credit card companies, brokerage accounts, etc.) Let's start with Mint. Mint is a web-based tool (owned by the same company as Quicken) whose main feature is its ability to connect to nearly every financial institution you're likely to use. Mint aggregates that data for you and presents it on the homepage. This makes it very easy to see your net worth and changes to it over time, spending trends, track your progress on budgets and long-term goals, etc. Mint allows you to do all of this with little or no data entry. It has support for your investments but does not allow for deep analysis of them. Quicken is a desktop program. It is extremely feature rich in terms of supporting different types of accounts, transactions, reports, reconciliation, etc. One could use Quicken to do everything that I just described about Mint, but the power of Quicken is in its more manual features. For example, while Mint is centred on showing you your status, Quicken allows you to enter transactions in real-time (as you're writing a check, initiating a transfer, etc) and later reconciles them with data from your financial institutions. Link Mint, Quicken has good integration with financial companies so you can generally get away with as little or as much data entry as you want. For example, you can manually enter large checks and transfers (and later match to automatically-downloaded data) but allow small entries like credit card purchases to download automatically.  Bottom line, if you're just looking to keep track of where you are at, try Mint. It's very simple and free. If you need more power and want to manage your finances on a more transactional level, try Quicken (though I believe they do not have a trial version, I don't understand why). The learning curve is steep although probably gentler than that of GnuCash. Last note on why Mint.com is free: it's the usual ad-supported model, plus Mint sells aggregated consumer behaviour reports to other institutions (since Mint has everyone's transactions, it can identify consumer trends). If you're not comfortable with that, or with the idea of giving a website passwords to all your financial accounts, you will find Quicken easier to accept. Hope this helps. I generally concur with your sentiments. mint.com has 'hack me' written all over it.  I know of two major open source tools for accounting: GNUCash and LedgerSMB. I use GNUCash, which comes close to meeting your needs: The 2.4 series introduced SQL DB support; mysql, postgres and sqlite are all supported. I migrated to sqlite to see how the schema looked and ran, the conclusion was that it runs fine but writing direct sql queries is probably beyond me. I may move it to postgres in the future, just so I can write some decent reports. Note that while it uses HTML for reporting, there is no no web frontend. It still requires a client, and is not multi-user safe. But it's probably about the closest to what you what that still falls under the heading of 'personal finance'. A fork of SQL Ledger, this is postgreSQL only but does have a web frontend. All the open source finance webapps I've found are designed for small to medium busineses. I believe it should meet your needs, though I've never used it. It might be overkill and difficult to use for your limited purposes though. I know one or two people in the regional LUG use LedgerSMB, but I really don't need invoicing and paystubs. "I've just recently launched an open source wealth management platform - wealthbot.io ...  ""Webo"" is mostly targeted at RIA's to help the manage multiple portfolios, etc. Take a look at the demo at demo.wealthbot.io, you'll also find links to github, etc. there. It's a rather involved project, but if you are looking for use cases of rebalancing, portfolio accounting, custodian integration, tax loss harvesting, and many other features available at some of the popular robo-advisors, you might find it interesting." "I use the (gratis, libre) command-line program ledger for my personal accounts.  It handles funds across accounts gracefully, through a feature called ""Virtual Accounts"".  A transaction can add or subtract money from a virtual account, which need not balance with all the other entries in the transaction.  Then it's just a matter of setting up reports to include or exclude these accounts." "Quicken. I am in the same situation. I've tried mint.com and switched back to Quicken because i want to know how much money i'll have in my accounts in 2 weeks, 4 weeks, etc.  I have to admit though, quicken is getting worse and worse every year. Can't really say i ""recommend"" it." Look up You Need A Budget...the methodology is really the key and the software is elegant and practical.  It's not about tracking spending, it's about planning what your dollars are going to do.  The application automates much of the budget planning and data entry as it remembers your input (and is totally customizable).  If you follow their basic blueprint, you can spend just minutes a week.  They offer free online classes too (love this).  I do not have skin in their game but have been a fan since it was just a spreadsheet. And yes, they have a mobile app, which means you can enter transactions on the go with just a few taps and then have your data synced across the cloud or just across your network. "Yodlee and Mint are good solutions if you don't mind your personal financial information being stored ""in the cloud"". I do, so I use Quicken. Quicken stores whatever you give to it for as long as you want: so the only question is how to get the credit card transactions you want into it? All my financial institutions allow me to view my credit card statements for a year back, and download them in a form Quicken can read. So you can have a record of your transactions from a year ago right now, and in a year you will have two year's worth." Most businesses have some sort of software to manage their client data.  Most of these various software and/or services are industry specific.  Black Diamond seems to be a client management tool targeting investment advisers. From the black diamond site Reach an unparalleled level of productivity and transform your client conversations. You don't need one of these unless you're a professional investment adviser with so many clients you can't track them yourself or need more robust reporting or statement generation tools. For your purposes most regular brokers, Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, TD, etc, have more than enough tools for the retail level investor.  They have news feeds, security analysis papers, historical data, stock screeners, etc.  You, a regular retail investor doesn't need to buy special software, your broker will generally provide these things as part of the service. "Note that mutual funds' quarterly/annual reports usually have this number. I generally just let my home-accounting software project my future net worth; its numbers agree well enough with those I've gotten from more ""professional"" sources such as monte-carlo modelling. (They'd agree better if I fed in all the details of my paycheck, but I don't feel like doing the work to keep that up to date.) I'm using Quicken, but I assume MS Money and other competitors have the same capability if you buy the appropriate version." "I'm another programmer, I guess we all just like complicated things, or got here via stackoverflow. Obligatory tedious but accurate point: Investing is not personal finance, in fact it's maybe one of the less important parts of it. See this answer: Where to start with personal finance?  Obligatory warning for software developer type minds: getting into investing because it's complicated and therefore fun is a really awful idea from a financial perspective.  Or see behavioral finance research on how analytical/professional/creative type people are often terrible at investing, while even-tempered practical people are better. The thing with investing is that inaction is better than action, tried and true is better than creative, and simple is better than complicated. So if you're like me and many programmers and like creative, complicated action - not good for the wallet. You've been warned. That said. :-) Stuff I read In general I hate reading too much financial information because I think it makes me take ill-advised actions. The actions I most need to take have to do with my career and my spending patterns. So I try to focus on reading about software development, for example. Or I answer questions on this site, which at least might help someone out, and I enjoy writing. For basic financial news and research, I prefer Morningstar.com, especially if you get the premium version. The writing has more depth, it's often from qualified financial analysts, and with the paid version you get data and analysis on thousands of funds and stocks, instead of a small number as with Motley Fool newsletters. I don't follow Morningstar regularly anymore, instead I use it for research when I need to pick funds in a 401k or whatever. Another caveat on Morningstar is that the ""star ratings"" on funds are dumb. Look at the Analyst Picks and the analyst writeups instead. I just flipped through my RSS reader and I have 20-30 finance-related blogs in there collecting unread posts. It looks like the only one I regularly read is http://alephblog.com/ which is sort of random. But I find David Merkel very thoughtful and interesting. He's also a conservative without being a partisan hack, and posts frequently. I read the weekly market comment at http://hussmanfunds.com/ as well. Most weeks it says the market is overvalued, so that's predictable, but the interesting part is the rationale and the other ideas he talks about. I read a lot of software-related blogs and there's some bleed into finance, especially from the VC world; blogs like http://www.avc.com/ or http://bhorowitz.com/ or whatever. Anyway I spend most of my reading time on career-related stuff and I think this is also the correct decision from a financial perspective. If you were a doctor, you'd be better off reading about doctoring, too. I read finance-related books fairly often, I guess there are other threads listing ideas on that front. I prefer books about principles rather than a barrage of daily financial news and questionable ideas. Other than that, I keep up with headlines, just reading the paper every day including business-related topics is good enough. If there's some big event in the financial markets, it'll show up in the regular paper. Take a class I initially learned about finance by reading a pile of books and alongside that taking the CFP course and the first CFA course. Both are probably equivalent to about a college semester worth of work, but you can plow through them in a couple months each if you focus. You can just do the class (and take the exam if you like), without having to go on and actually get the work experience and the certifications. I didn't go on to do that. This sounds like a crazy thing to do, and it kind of is, but I think it's also sort of crazy to expect to be competent on a topic without taking some courses or otherwise getting pretty deep into the material. If you're a normal person and don't have time to take finance courses, you're likely better off either keeping it super-simple, or else outsourcing if you can find the right advisor: What exactly can a financial advisor do for me, and is it worth the money?  When it's inevitably complex (e.g. as you approach retirement) then an advisor is best. My mom is retiring soon and I found her a professional, for example. I like having a lot of knowledge myself, because it's just the only way I could feel comfortable. So for sure I understand other people wanting to have it too. But what I'd share from the other side is that once you have it, the conclusion is that you don't have enough knowledge (or time) to do anything fancy anyway, and that the simple answers are fine. Check out http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Simple-Financial-Strategies-People/dp/0743269942 Investing for fun isn't investing for profit Many people recommend Motley Fool (I see two on this question already!). The site isn't evil, but the problem (in my opinion) is that it promotes an attitude toward and a style of investing that isn't objectively justifiable for practical reasons. Essentially I don't think optimizing for making money and optimizing for having fun coexist very well. If investing is your chosen hobby rather than fishing or knitting, then Motley Fool can be fun with their tone and discussion forums, but other people in forums are just going to make you go wrong money-wise; see behavioral finance research again. Talking to others isn't compatible with ice in your decision-making veins. Also, Motley Fool tends to pervasively make it sound like active investing is easier than it is. There's a reason the Chartered Financial Analyst curriculum is a few reams of paper plus 4 years of work experience, rather than reading blogs. Practical investing (""just buy the target date fund"") can be super easy, but once you go beyond that, it's not. I don't really agree with the ""anyone can do it and it's not work!"" premise, any more than I think that about lawyering or doctoring or computer programming. After 15 years I'm a programming expert; after some courses and a lot of reading, I'm not someone who could professionally run an actively-managed portfolio. I think most of us need to have the fun part separate from the serious cash part. Maybe literally distinct accounts that you keep at separate brokerages. Or just do something else for fun, besides investing. Morningstar has this problem too, and finance.yahoo.com, and Bloomberg, I mean, they are all interested in making you think about investing a lot more than you ought to. They all have an incentive to convince you that the latest headlines make a difference, when they don't. Bottom line, I don't think personal finance changes very quickly; the details of specific mutual funds change, and there's always some new twist in the tax code, but the big picture is pretty stable. I think going in-depth (say, read the Chartered Financial Analyst curriculum materials) would teach you a lot more than reading blogs frequently. The most important things to work on are income (career) and spending (to maximize income minus spending). That's where time investment will pay off. I know it's annoying to argue the premise of the question rather than answering, but I did try to mention a couple things to read somewhere in there ;-)"