Software to Help Budget Your Money
Budgeting can be helpful in managing your income, expenses, savings and investments to ensure that your finances stay under control. Software budgeting programs use computer technology to create interactive systems to help you control every aspect of your finances. Understanding the features of types of software to help budget your money can help you to choose the software package that best matches your needs.
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Features
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The most fundamental feature of budgeting software is the ability to track your income and expenses. Expenses can easily get out of control and being able to view your expenses at a glance can help you to identify areas of needed improvement.
Budgeting software can also allow you to set and monitor goals for things like monthly earnings and savings deposits. Software is also useful in preparing detailed reports and charts to provide deeper insight into your finances. Charts can show you the ratio of your discretionary spending to income, for example, or can graph trends in your utilities expenses.
Premium Software
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Premium software offers the widest range of features and services for users, but it comes packaged with a price. As the saying goes, "you get what you pay for." Premium budgeting software often comes bundled with live technical support contracts, free product updates and other incentives in addition to their more robust suite of services. Quicken and YNAB are both popular, premium budgeting programs. Quicken offers products ranging from $50 to $100.
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Free Software
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Free software is designed to serve the same basic functions as premium software, but finding a free program that matches premium products' feature sets can be virtually impossible. Free budgeting software can be ideal for individuals with income and expenses that are not too complex, or for people who only wish to use the most basic budgeting features.
dsBudget and Buddi are examples of free budgeting software. Both products are open source, allowing the user community to create and submit improvements to the software.
Online Software
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Online budgeting programs utilize the "software as a service" business model, also referred to as cloud computing. Online software allows you to access a program that is stored on a server somewhere else in the world. While this affords the advantages of not having to install any software on your computer and being able to access the software from any computer with an Internet connection, the drawback is that you must store your personal financial information on a remote server which may be vulnerable to computer intrusion and information theft.
Mint is an example of a free, online budgeting program. Mint also offers a free smartphone app to give you even more control over your finances.
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