Top 10 Free Financial Software for Better Money Management

As the world is going cyber every day, managing your finance (or should I say e-money) needs more than your bank accounts, cheque books, bank transaction reports and etc. Why tax your brain so much when there is a mega-flop (no pun intended, its all digital) machine at your home? There are software for almost everything and today I am going to name 25 of them. These free finance support software are not only going to manage your personal finance, but also stock trading, investment analysis and much more. So let’s count it right now.

1. Clear Checkbook

ClearCheckbook.com is an essentially an easy to use tool that helps you balance your checkbook and manage your money to keep track of your personal finances.

• Balancing - Ability to balance your checkbook from anywhere you have internet access.
• Reports - View reports to see where your money is going and compare your spending and saving month to month.
• Mobile - Specially designed interface for your iPhone and iPod Touch. Manage your finances from anywhere you have a cellphone or wifi connection!
• Automation - Automatic recurring transactions and notices so you never forget to pay your bills.
• Budgets - Set monthly budgets for your various accounts and spending categories.
• CheckBot - Update your account from your cellphone SMS or AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, and Google Talk Messenger services.
• Free Basic Membership - The site is 100% free to sign up and use. You can sign up with their premium membership for a small cost each month.

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2. GnuCash

GnuCash is a personal and small-business financial accounting program. Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses.

Features

• Double-Entry Accounting
• Checkbook-style register provides a custom, convenient and familiar interface to entering financial transactions. The register supports common checking and credit-card transactions, as well as income, stock and currency transactions
• General Ledger
• Transaction Finder: a powerful transaction query dialogue
• Split Transactions: A single transaction can be split into several pieces to record taxes, fees, and other journal entries.
• Stock/Bond/Mutual Fund Accounts - track stocks individually (one per account) or in portfolio of accounts (a group of accounts that can be displayed together).
• Small-Business Accounting
• Customers, Vendors, Jobs, Invoices, A/P, A/R
• QIF/OFX/HBCI Import, Transaction Matching
• Reports:Display Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss, Portfolio Valuation
• Graphs
• Scheduled Transactions
• Financial Calculations
• Check Printing
• Support for Multiple Currencies
• Mortgage & Loan Repayment Druid
• The current binary file-format is being redeveloped as XML, thus simplifying storage and network transport questions
• Handles internationalized dates and currencies. The Gnucash menus and popups have been translated to Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Ukranian, and British English. Documentation is available in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish.

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3. Grisbi

Grisbi is a personnal accounting application running under GNU/Linux and Windows, released under the GPL licence.

Grisbi can manage multiple accounts, currencies and users. It manages third party, expenditure and receipt categories, as well as budgetary lines, financial years, and other informations that makes it quite adapted for associations (except those that require double entry accounting)

Features

• Graphical user interface
• Multi-account Handling
• Totally customizable financial printable reports
• Scheduled Transactions
• OFX, QIF, GnuCash, CSV (in development version) Import
• QIF, CSV Export
• Multi-Currency Transaction Handling

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4. Money Manager Ex

Money Manager Ex (MMEX) is a cross-platform, easy-to-use personal finance software. It primarily helps organize one’s finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes. It is also a tool to get a bird’s eye view of your financial worth.

Features

• Intuitive. Simple, Fast, Clean
• AES Encryption Support
• Maintain checking, credit card, savings, stock investment accounts
• Budgeting
• Maintain and Track Fixed Assets with depreciation
• Reminders for recurring Bills and Deposits
• Simple one click reporting
• Cash Flow Forecasting
• Graphs, Piecharts
• Does not require an install. Can run from a USB key.
• International language support (Available in 24 languages)
• Import data from any CSV format, QIF [ Microsoft Money ]
• Printing, Exporting to HTML, CSV
• Non-Proprietary SQLite Database

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5. Home Bank

HomeBank is a fast, simple and easy to use program to manage your accounts.

Features

• Multi-accounts
• Payee assign to transactions
• Categories and subcategories assign to transactions
• Simple annual budget
• Transaction import in CSV format (homebank specific format)
• Pre-defined transactions, which can be automated
• Pre-filling of transactions from a bookmark
• Dual pad of cheque and automated cheque number increment
• Add transactions by inherit from existing ones
• Multiple transactions edit for each columns at once
• Easy transfert between accounts, which can be automated
• Dynamic transactions filter everywhere
• Visual paymode and additional info text field
• Visual status of transactions
• Transaction remind (kind of ‘post-it’)
• Dynamic minor currency display toggle for Euro countries
• Analysis features - Dynamic, easy and powerful reports with graphical charts:
  • Complete filter for every transaction fields
  • Easy period change with some useful presets
  • ‘Statictics’ is the main report and show results computed by: Payee, Categories, Months, Years
  • ‘Budget’ track the decay from what was normaly planned
  • ‘Overdrawn’ focuses on the balance and point transactions in the ‘red zone’
  • ‘Car cost’ analyze your car specific costs and consumption of fuel

Homesite

6. Mint

Mint is a free online personal finance software that offers something truly different: Mint tells you how you can save money, and it has some nice automated features.

• Mint automatically updates your banking and credit card transactions, eliminating the possibility of forgetting to enter transactions.
• Mint automatically categorizes transactions as they are downloaded.
• Label transactions to be able to quickly identify expenses that are related to work, hobbies, meals out, etc.
• View all banking and credit card transactions and account balances side by side.
• Mint works with 3,000 U.S. banks and credit card companies.
• Compares cash and debt for quick overall financial reporting, and Mint offers spending histories.
• Email and SMS alerts let you know about low balances, large purchases and other financial activities in your accounts.
• Security: firewalls, encryption and authentication procedures protect your personal finance data.
• Mint tells about banking and credit card deals and money-saving products and services you could benefit from using. This information is kept out of the way under the Ways to Save tab.

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7. LedgerSMB

LedgerSMB is a double entry accounting system.  It is a fork of a popular general ledger software package called SQL-Ledger, and seeks to provide better security and data integrity controls, better community support, open documentation, and more.

Features

• Enhanced security
• More reports
• An Open Development Model
• Better data integrity controls
• Central database for users and preferences
• Better Point of Sale hardware support
• Merged SL-POS, a point of sale framework
• API for handling credit card processing

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8. Rapid

RAPID Analysis Program for Investment Decisions (RAPID) graphs stock and commodity data for technical analysis.

RAPID provides stock/commodity charts, buy/sell accounting and trade profit graphing, plus dozens of technical analysis tools.

• Technical tools:
  • Candlesticks
  • OBV
  • Moving averages simple, exponential and weighted
  • Volatility
  • Macd
  • Stochastics
  • RSI
  • Wilder DMI
  • Standard deviation bands
  • Trendlines
  • Time-horizon lines
  • Fibonacci
  • Slope
  • Momentum
  • CCI
  • Bollinger bands
  • Probability osc
  • Cycle finder
  • Derivative and Integration chart
  • Williams accumulation and distribution, point and figure
• Import text data sources
• Multiple journals to record your trades, graph your trading performance and calculate your year-end tax totals
• Time-horizon lines, volatility and parabolic systems include trading signals

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9. Eclipse Trader

Eclipse Trader is an Eclipse RCP application for online stock trading with many interesting features. The software users with a range of Technical Analysis indicators and tools.

• Realtime Quotes
• Intraday Charts
• History Charts
• Technical Analisys Indicators
• Price Patterns Detection
• Financial News
• Level II (Book) Market Data
• Trading Accounts Management
• Integrated Trading

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10. MySpendingPlan

MySpendingPlan online personal finance software has strong personal budgeting features and a focus on building savings.

Features

• Detailed budget set-up.
• Manage budgets and spending for groups or for your household.
• Bill tracking with email reminders from MySpendingPlan.
• Set up savings goals in MySpendingPlan and track progress toward those goals.
• Shopping features include shopping planner, online shopping deals, shopping lists, savings recommendations, online and in-store coupons.
• Security: MySpendingPlan uses strong data encryption and does not require account numbers to be entered.
• Pre-made templates for standard personal budgets or for planning for large, infrequent expenses.

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