Robin's Tech Tips

It’s a good habit to keep an eye on your money and know how much you have spent in the past and how much you can spend in the future.

Although bank statements, credit card statement or online bank accounts provide all such information, these pieces of information scatter here and there and you lose track quickly and don’t have a whole picture to see where you are going. It gets worse when there are several bank / credit card accounts. So having a software or web sites to consolidate all such information seems a good idea.

Other than using a spread sheet to keep all the information together, there are quite a few sophisticated software or web site to do this job, some cost your money, some just free. The following lists some choices.

Desktop Financial Software – not free
Quicken, Microsoft Money. They are traditional desktop applications. That means you have to install them one your computer before you want to use them to manage your money. I haven’t used them but it should be easy to get started for a normal person.
It seems that quicken has a free online version for money management. However, don’t know how “free” it is and how many features it has.

Desktop Financial Software – free
GnuCash, jGnash. Both of them are free and probably open source software. GnuCash is actually beyond the personal level and can be used for catering small business (seems equivalent to Microsoft office accounting software). To use them, you may probably need to have a little bit of financial knowledge. For example, what is double entry?

Websites / online services / personal finance 2.0?
If you are confident enough to allow third party websites to handle your financial information, then you may embrace such so-called personal finance 2.0 websites. Among them are greensherpa.com, justthrive.com, rudder.com, mint.com and etc.

Most of them can retrieve your transactions from your nominated financial institutions or banks and aggregate them automatically for you and provide basic financial advice based on the data. Some of them charge you subscribe fee to use the online service, while some of them have free versions. However, it seems most of them are US version, i.e., they can only retrieve data from US banks.

Finally, a few words on the financial data formats and standards.
Quicken Interchange Format (QIF) is an open specification for reading and writing financial data to media.
Open Financial Exchange (OFX) comes from Microsoft and Intuit (the maker of Quicken) and it is a data-stream format for exchanging financial information.

The above two formats are quite popular and most of the financial software support the importation and exportation of the files in such formats. And most of the online banking system support them as well.