Money management software: best features

A money management software program can simplify your life. With the constant demands on your time, you want something that is not only useful, but of the plug and play variety as well as affordable.

It wouldn't hurt to take a few minutes to ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish by using a personal finance program and what's important to you in doing so. The few items below are what I have always found of value to me:

• Affordability: Although not the primary consideration, it is however an important one. While trying to simplify organizing your finances, you want to keep frugality in mind. Getting the best product, costing the least, kills two birds with one stone.

• Simplicity is another big consideration. Let's face it, most of us are not financial geniuses or CPA's nor are we interested in being so. A program must be intuitive or user friendly otherwise we can quickly lose interest. Even if we succeed in setting it up, we could be reluctant to use it if too cumbersome.

• It should mirror the way we lead our financial lives: If you can pick up the phone and transfer money from one account to another, your money management software should allow you to go on line any time, download transactions, pay bills, transfer money etc.. It should also let you do it without incurring any additional charges.

• Provides useful feedback: As a benefit of diligently recording all your financial transactions, it should be able, at a click of a button tell you the state of your finances. Provide you with reports and graphs showing your total income and expenses and what's left over. It should let you know if you are within budget, What you are worth and whether you are on track with retirement goals.

• Easy navigation and simplicity of the program "Help" feature should be a given. Having easy access through chat or e-mail to live help support will also earn kudos from users at any stage of the game.

• Protection: Having the ability to secure your data with passwords or encryption , providing backup capabilities both on-line as well as offline should be a given to prevent lost of information as well as unauthorized access.

• Meeting future needs: If you are an investor or future investor you'll need a program that can grow with you. After all almost everything can be done on line nowadays. You shouldn't need to get a paper statement from your discount broker to know the value of your portfolio, downloading your information should be at will.

• Organization: with the recording of all your financial transactions a money management software program should virtually eliminate organization issues at Tax time. If done properly it should give you the ability to have or even be able to download most of the information needed for your accountant or your own tax preparation program.