I've been thinking a lot about personal finances lately, mainly trying to get back on top of things. It seems that during the study season, this is one area that I let go, probably because it doesn't need daily attention. Thanks to Knapper, I now have a few personal finance blogs in my feeds. Knapper also has been talking about possibly putting together a personal finance site, maybe with more analyses than the other sites give. I think this would be a cool project for him, and I've extended my web design services.
Currently, I use Microsoft Money to manage my accounts. Having used it for many years, I wouldn't be opposed to switching to a different application, given time to do so. There's obviously Quicken and a few online apps popping up. I realize that there can be no single software that can do everything that everyone wants, but it seems that these applications should be better by now. The two things I can think of are budgeting and importing. The budgeting in Money is quite basic and can't handle some features I would like. I've read a lot of others feel the same way and the trend is to use a separate spreadsheet along with Money or Quicken. What I mean by importing is getting the daily transactions from various accounts into the application. It's gotten better in recent years, since all you really need to do is give Money your account information and it grabs the details online. This assumes that your accounts have online access (and Money knows about it) and offers downloads. Worse case is that you download the transactions in some format and import them into Money. I guess worse case would be that Money doesn't recognize the file. Anyway, I've always wanted to build my own financial software, but that would be quite an undertaking. I would certainly offer it for free on Knappers site.
No comments:
Post a Comment