What do you look for in Financial Management Software?

Question

inspired by this post.

Looking for responses such as:

• What is most important
• What do you see in your current or past apps that you think should be better/different (how)

Answer 1

Well, here are my musts for personal finance software:

1. It must be able to download transactions from my institutions (including my local credit union), even if I have to manually download.

2. It must allow me to manually enter transactions, like checks I've written that haven't yet made it to the bank. The ability to create a manual account, like for cash, is a must.

3. It must allow me to plan for the future. I am very disappointed that MS Money is being discontinued, only because with it goes the only accurate cash flow forecast I've found in any software. Envelope system-based programs allow the user to plan for the future pretty well too.

And here are some other important factors:

1. It shouldn't take 10 minutes to start up and/or download my transactions. If I don't use the software for stocks, I don't need it to update the current stock prices.

2. It should allow me the flexibility of creating new categories. Tagging (allowing multiple tags assigned to a single transaction) is even better.

3. I like things to be free. :)

Answer 2

Being an Accountant, I look for things that first do the accounting properly, even if it is simplified for non-accountants which is fine. The financial industry has been in quite a fluid state for some time, so I expect my software to keep with the changes both in financial products and technology supporting the financial products. It should be flexible to support both simple and complex levels of finances - from a single bank account to multiple accounts, financial instruments, real estate, metals, businesses, etc. At this stage in the game, I expect it to provide "ubiquitous" data, meaning access to the data everywhere - phone, web, and desktop. It should be simple too use and take advantage of technology to ease the process. Quicken allows you to enter data multiple ways depending on your preference. I have tried other applications such as MS Money, but they seem too intent on fitting you into their mold. Because it is what I do, I tend to push these apps farther than most people and demand more of them.

A long time ago I used Andrew Tobias' Managing Your Money (wow that was a LONG time ago!) but since that went down the tubes I switched to Quicken and never looked back. Intuit, the company that makes Quicken, is very user-centric and listens to ideas. Their product is constantly improving. I prefer Quicken above the online solutions because the online solutions trap your data online. I've seen how the net can go down and I want a solution that doesn't have that weakness. Quicken also provides a similar experience to its business solution QuickBooks. As a CPA, Quickbooks is my solution of choice for small business because of its ease of use, technically sound accounting, integration with other office software and compared to other competitors, less problems and greater flexibility to make it perform how you want it to. The Reporting is also excellent on both Quicken and QuickBooks. While I generally only recommend Quicken for small, part-time home businesses, QuickBooks handles business up to fairly substantial size. Only when you run into high transaction volume and the need for complex reporting and chart of accounts do you need to consider alternatives, as that is where QuickBooks becomes limited.