What Is the Best Personal Finance Software?

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Dave Andrews, today I'm going to talk to you about what I think is the best personal finance software. I use Quicken for all of my personal finances and I think it's the greatest software out there and it also ranges from sort of the low end, sort of just you know home people using it all the way up to a large businesses, enterprises using it. And it will range for about thirty dollars to a hundred dollars depending on the type or version that you buy. You'll be fine buying the thirty dollar version from the store. I'm going to show you a little bit about how to use it. Let's click on the start button. We'll go to all programs, lets go to Quicken and just open up Quicken. Now what this shows you on this very first screen is what's called the cash flow for the given month that you are looking at. I'm looking at January two thousand and nine. And as you can see on the in I haven't put in any income for this month so it's currently showing zero. But it also has a minus out which would show me any expenses or bills or you know ledger expenses that I put in and it would subtract those and I would get what's left, which would be my current balance for January eighteenth and it will also show me down here my cash flow difference for the entire month. Now I'll put in a real quick couple of ledger items and show you how quick it handles it. Over here on the left I'm going to go down to my checking account I'm going to right click on it, I'm going to say go to checking and then on the overview it allows me to delete this account or reconcile this account or I can set it up to actually connect to my bank online which is a very neat tool that Quicken provides. And I use that quite a bit. It will actually go and download every single transaction from my bank and I can also click here and view a few reports. But what I'm wanting to do is I'm wanting to create a new transaction within this system and you can do so by either using a scheduled bill or deposit or you can download your transaction as I was saying before. So as you can see I've added my transaction and it now shows up with fifty dollars in my checking account. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just talked to you a little bit about personal finance software."