U3A Highvale Personal Finance Managers

A popular use for a personal computer is keeping track of your personal finances. This software is not a full blown accounting package such as , QuickBooks or MYOB which are used by companies to track their transactions and finances in order to meet government regulations. Personal finance managers assist us to keep track of where our money comes from and goes to and make completing a tax return simpler.

Some programs such as (https://www.quicken.com) or Personal Plus (https://www.reckon.com/au/personal/plus/) will cost you an annual fee ($180) to use them but are very extensive as to the records they keep and the reports they can generate. These programs manage your spending, assist in bill paying, track your investments, create a budget or even run a small business. Quicken is an American product with various levels of support for Australian banks and taxation regulations depending upon your . Reckon was the Australian agent for Quicken but decided many years ago to produce a competing product, so there are strong similarities.

Moneyspire (https://www.moneyspire.com) has a Standard ($29.99) and a Pro ($39.99) version with additional customer invoicing for a one-off payment that will keep track of your bank accounts, bills and budget and create reports for you. (https://moneydance.com) is another cheap product at a one-off price of $72.99. It is primarily a desktop program but also comes with a free Mobile App so you can enter or edit transactions and view balances when on the go.

Some programs come as online Applications, such as MoneyBrilliant (https://moneybrilliant.com.au/features/) so you can keep track of your finances on your phone or desktop. There are 2 plans, free or $9.90 per month / $99 per year depending upon what services you wish to use. Intuit, the creators of Quicken, also have a free online product called Mint (https://mint.intuit.com). Mint is free because they partner with companies that will assist you with financial advice, and probably advertising.

Open Source Software (free) also provides various personal finance managers. HomeBank (http://homebank.free.fr/en/index.php) from France is very popular in Windows, and although it won’t automatically integrate with Australian banks you can still download bank records and then add them to the program. It will also handle multiple currencies. There are others such as GnuCash and KMyMoney or but each one has its own limitations, especially for the Australian market, that may require a more manual approach.

Please let us know if you have any recommendations or experience with any Personal Financial Manager. Some of the above programs make your life simpler by direct access to your bank accounts whereas others require you to manually synchronize or check your data.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_personal_finance_software provides the following advice: The use of expense tracking, budgeting, and other personal finance software carries some risk, most notably is due to the disclosure of a username, password, or other account credentials used to automatically synchronize banking information with an expense tracking application. Another significant area of risk is due to sensitive personal information that is stored anytime data is digitized. This risk may be compounded based on the security the software vendor has implemented as well as the availability of the data and where specifically it is stored (online or a local application). An often overlooked form of risk is due to the monetization model and privacy practices of the vendor or software provider, whether the application is "free" or fee based. Open source software is one way of potentially minimizing the risks of privacy and monetization related risks of data exposure.