Personal Bookkeeping Software: What Tools Can Increase Your Company’s Efficiency?

David Adelman for FinancesOnLine.com writes: The world is in some form of financial upheaval daily, and the shockwaves come to you from many different directions. There are days when the danger seems remote, and days when you feel that your personal finances are under grave and imminent danger. It’s always good to know where you, as an individual, actually stand with your money. And it’s tough to do this unless you have some help from personal bookkeeping software. Marnie is a working mother, and this is her story.

“We were hit hard by the financial crisis. My husband and I were both laid off and we’re just starting to rebuild or finances and our lives. We were among the lucky few who didn’t find it hard to find replacement jobs but we decided we can’t risk going through the same pain all over again. The pain and anguish is just too much for one family to bear. We decided to fight back by taking uncertainty out of the picture. Good or bad, we wanted to see exactly how our finances are doing at any given moment. We realized that the solution for this would be to account for it like businesses do, therefore we need the power of personal bookkeeping software to help us out. Because we’re a household, we don’t have the money to pay for expensive accounting applications. We need a cost-effective solution. What are our choices?”

Fortunately, there is an abundance of free personal finance applications in the market that will help you manage and be more responsible with your personal finances. Whether it’s your own money, the combined financial resources of an entire household, or a small business that your managing from home, there are programs that can help you sort your bookkeeping out.
Read this quick comparison of the best accounting softwarefor small businesses available today. Some of them are so cheap they’re almost free, and there are some offered as freemiums. You don’t have to pay if you’re only using the standard features.  Some of the the systems listed on this page are discussed in greater detail below. Another page on the same site also provides helpful tips on what to look for in accounting software and how to find one that best suits your needs.

Here’s one tip that will surely take you in the right direction. Run your finances like a business. What does this mean with respect to your personal or household finances? It means that you treat each source of income as a client and record any transactions (e.g. salaries) with that entity as income. Clear enough? Once you do this, you will have the considerable power of many accounting software systems at your disposal.

You’ll be able to run profit and loss reports to see whether you’re spending more than you’re earning. You’ll be able to keep tabs of the taxes that you owe. You can use the balance sheet to check the financial sheet of the household at any given moment. Thinking of your personal finances this way gives you a fighting edge over the financial uncertainty that’s clouded the horizon for many years now.

Let’s take a look at some of the personal bookkeeping software that you can choose from.

QuickBooks Online Plus is an excellent choice if you want to manage your finances using a mobile device. It’s not as complete as the desktop version but is very easy to use, thanks to an intuitive interface. It’s also affordable. Pricing starts at $23 per month per user. If you have a small business, you can use QuickBooks to do the bookkeeping for your business as well as your personal and household finances.

FreshBooks is your most cost-effective choice if you run a small business. It allows small business owners to be up and running with invoices and estimates in just a few hours. You can set up late payment reminders so that your delinquent clients are reminded by email automatically. You can build tasks around projects and use this to log the time you’ve worked. This is very handy if you want to organize your activities around projects, and assign a cost to the time you’re spending on this project.

Outright helps you tracks income and expenses, create reports and it uses that data to give you an estimate of what you might owe in taxes. Outright does things for free, with a clean and uncluttered user interface that’s a joy to navigate.

GNUCash is an absolutely free program that’s great if you don’t mind importing some numbers into MS Excel to get the proper reports. Of course you will need some knowledge of spreadsheets to do this.

Check proactively stays on top of your bills and monitors your bank accounts and credit cards, all in one place. When bills are due or funds are low, Check will let you know.

YNAB stands for You Need a Budget. It works by assigning each dollar to a job. It teaches you how to be more financially responsible by walking you through the paces of making a budget, explaining why budgeting is important as you go.

You won’t go wrong with any of these popular choices—just pick the one best suited to your needs. Also make sure you’re dialed in to the discussions in the very active market by reading articles such as this one from the Entrepreneur online magazine on “Accounting Apps for Your Number-Crunching Needs.”