Review of budget software

Better yet, it's easy to sign up and try the software for yourself. Even in its most basic guise the package has plenty of features, but get the best from Pocketguard by heading for the Plus edition.

Not everybody finds it easy to manage their money, which is why budgeting software can be such a help. The great thing is that in many cases, where budgeting software isn't free, it can be trialled so you can make an informed decision on the one that suits your needs best without any major commitment.

Choosing the right budgeting software involves having a short checklist of wants in your head, usually surrounding how many tools will be at your disposal to help manage your personal finance more effectively. However, if you've got relatively simple financial affairs there's also no point in heading for a complex and very powerful package. What usually happens in that scenario is you'll end up with lots of features and functions that are rarely, or never used.

When it comes to lining up our shortlist of best budgeting software we spent time working our way through all of the features and functions on offer. Central to the list of requirements is ease of use, because it doesn't matter if you've got lots of tools at your disposal if they're too hard to figure out. We also looked at value for money, how software programs worked on different platforms and if app editions lived up to our expectations.

We were also keen to see how many budgeting programs have kept up with the times. After all, the financial picture is constantly changing for all of us, so knowing that you've got a software program that can handle the latest rules and regulations is a must-have. North America. Jump to: ow to choose the best budgeting software How we test personal finance software. The best budgeting software can help you keep a record of your spending and saving, to better manage your finances.

Click the links below to go to the provider's website: 1. CountAbout 2. Mint 3. YNAB 4. Quicken 5. Moneydance 6. Reasons to avoid - Premium subscription for automating data imports - More features than you might need. View Deal. Reasons to avoid - A bit of a mixed bag - Some tricky bits to master - No bill paying. Reasons to avoid - Higher priced than other options - Needs time to master properly.

Reasons to avoid - Higher cost - Quite complex in places. Reasons to avoid - One-off initial cost - Looks a little tired. Reasons to avoid - Only for more basic money matters - Support can be patchy. AWS went down hard, yet again - here's what happened. It might be time to consider running Ubuntu on your smartphone. Honor's new foldable phone is bigger and more powerful than the Galaxy Z Fold 3. Simplifi caught most of our expenses from looking at our checking accounts, but you can add your own with little effort.

The pop-up screen to add a transaction or create a recurring transaction is user-friendly, with large, clearly labeled fields for selecting how often the expense happens, when if ever the expense will end, the account it belongs to, and so on.

You can create a watchlist by category e. Once you create a watchlist, Simplifi will present your:. While budgeting apps all basically track your money coming in and going out, Simplifi also gives you a future look: The cash flow view projects your account balances for up to the next 6 months. By showing you how much you might have months from now, this feature can help you better plan for large expenses. The only other app we tested that has this forward-looking cash flow projection is PocketSmith , which can project up to 10 years into the future.

But PocketSmith had connectivity issues with our financial accounts. She broke down the numbers and came up with a realistic monthly budget. Knowing that her budget was tied to something she was looking forward to and that meant so much to her really motivated her to stick with it.

PST every day should you run into trouble. We used the chat when we wanted help setting up recurring bills, and the support agent sent us screenshots and detailed instructions on how to do it. The rest of the site functions smoothly. It offers more reports than competing budgeting apps and more control over how the information is presented. You can set up push notifications, or you can turn them off. Many of its competitors send email after email with information on using the app or improving your own finances.

Thankfully, Simplifi has dedicated its resources toward online coaches who can help you the moment you have an issue. The major turnoff for many will be the cost. Kristen Dillard, director of product management at Quicken, told us there are no plans to offer them in the future. Moreover, paying something for a budgeting app can incentivize you to stick with it rather than abandon the effort after a rash of syncing accounts.

We also ran into an issue accessing our account about two weeks after setting it up. Finally, while Simplifi has several frequency options for recurring bills every week, every two weeks, twice a month, every month, every 2 months, every quarter, every 6 months, or every year , other apps, including YNAB and PocketSmith, have more options, including daily and every other year. If you need that kind of specificity for some of your bills, Simplifi might not be for you.

After connecting your bank accounts and credit cards, you punch in how much you expect to spend in various categories. These are just estimates, and you can change the numbers later.

You can use your own category groupings, though. There are no free lunches or cold cuts! You can also set up targets for specific categories. These will trigger an alert in the mobile app, but not on desktop. With its auto-assign feature, you can have the app allocate money based on previous spending or due dates for scheduled transactions and goals.

Getting used to this philosophy of money management can take some time to learn, and using YNAB requires more active, regular maintenance than Simplifi does. For instance, we found it confusing at first to not be able to account for future income: You budget one month at a time based on what you currently have.

YNAB offers only email support, but there is a panoply of aids—from help docs to support forums to video courses to minute workshops —to help you get comfortable and confident using the app. The biggest problem we ran into with YNAB was connecting our checking and savings accounts. Initially, we had issues with Capital One, which has since been resolved. But then we had issues connecting the app to Fidelity.

If you have any concerns about compatibility with your bank accounts, contact support to find out for sure. Ah, Mint. The best-known budgeting app, with , ratings in the App Store, is once again not our pick.

It also may use your data to track you across other apps and websites. We never sell customer data. Many financial experts use or recommend it, including Get Money author Kristin Wong. Like Simplifi, Mint offers colorful spending-trend graphics, and adjusting your budget for the month is as easy as clicking an arrow. It also does a better job than Simplifi of monitoring your upcoming payments.

It was the only one of our finalists to show how much we were actually scheduled to pay for an impending credit card bill. We think Mint is fine for looking back at transactions to see where your money has gone, but not so much for precise planning ahead. If you love to crunch numbers in spreadsheets , Tiller may be for you. Like other budgeting apps, Tiller pulls in transactions from your bank and credit cards—except it places them in a Google Sheet or Microsoft Excel file.

Monthly budget and yearly budget worksheets will then show your actual spending and income against what you planned. The robust tool also lets you create rules to auto-categorize imported transactions based on many criteria, much like you might program a formula in a spreadsheet. Tiller is harder to set up than our picks because of multiple steps to connect the app really, a spreadsheet add-on or extension to your Google or Microsoft account.

This is tedious if you tend to have lots of new, non-recurring transactions. Still, Tiller is easier to use than manually updating a spreadsheet, and you can share the file with another person without having to give them your username and password. The reason we recommend apps is because they automate much of the data collection and calculations that you would otherwise have to do by hand, which is especially helpful if you have many different accounts and want to budget for more than one person.

The process can be painstaking but illuminating. Customize it as you see fit. If you happen to spend more on dining out than expected, either adjust your behavior or update your budget for the following month. The whole point of this exercise is to gain a better sense of how much money you have coming in and out so you can improve your financial life. Mvelopes is a zero-based budgeting app similar to YNAB. We decided to not recommend it this year because its lack of two-factor authentication is a dealbreaker.

EveryDollar , backed by personal finance guru Dave Ramsey, is another zero-based budgeting app, but we found connecting some bank accounts slow and frustrating. Zeta was the best app we tested for sharing a budget with someone else: Each person can have an individual budget and a shared one. Personal Capital offers some transaction tracking tools, but it has limited true budgeting features. In , we dismissed apps that are: only available on mobile, difficult to use, or lack decent guidance or tech support.

The point of a budget is to help control your personal finances so you live within your means, build up savings, and avoid taking on unnecessary debt. Although you can use fancy budgeting software, sometimes a simple sheet of paper or a spreadsheet can be sufficient. Gather your bills and your credit card and bank statements. Mint allows you to take control of your finances and manage everything particularly well via its impressive mobile editions.

Mint is software specifically designed for managing your money , which is very useful given the current coronavirus crisis. Keeping tabs on your finances can get complicated if you have numerous bank accounts as well as investments, pension contributions and savings to monitor alongside your daily outgoings.

Mint is owned by Intuit, which is also behind TurboTax and Quickbooks , which means security is at the forefront of its appeal.

Considering that Mint comes with a plethora of great features, and delivers a great user experience, the fact that it's free makes the software very appealing. However, it should be noted that Mint has to earn its keep one way or another and so, as a result, there are affiliate offers to deal with along the way. While we understand the need to turn a profit, this is perhaps the only real downside of the Mint experience.

The action centres on a few main features, with Mint offering the ability to connect to your bank, or banks, and other financial interests along with keeping an eye on your credit score.

Doing all this is really easy and involves nothing more than adding in accounts with the odd screen tap or two. Fear not; this is most notable on the app editions, which take into consideration what would happen if your phone gets lost or stolen.

Mint subsequently allows you to delete your financial data remotely. Mint is all about connectivity as it taps into your various financial interests and keeps the picture updated in a dynamic fashion. If you're running it on a mobile device, be it an Apple iPhone, iPad, Watch or on the Android platform you should find that it ticks over just fine.