To manage personal finances and keep track of expenses and the family budget, instead of using scribbled notes with a pen or mathematical accounts written on the personal agenda, it can be much easier and faster to use a computer program. The management programs very often frighten the less experienced because they seem complex and with unnecessary functionality compared to actual needs.
Instead, you can organize your finances by an excellent free program for Windows Mac and Linux that allows you to mark the numbers quickly with automatic processing of the sums and accounts so as to understand where the money spent ends up.
This program is not one of those that require a long job with the insertion of a thousand information and details about each expense.
The open source Money Manager Ex program is a personal accounting software to create a budget and control where money is spent .
Money Manager Ex can be downloaded for free for Windows, for Linux and for Mac and is also in Italian .
The first thing to do after installation is to create a new database by pressing the button and giving it a name.
In MoneyManagerEx, creating a database simply means creating an account with an .mdb file that must be saved with name on the computer.
The next step is to choose the currency and we could choose the Euro-Italy .
Then the name of the account is written, which can be the name of the bank account .
Finally, you can write your current account information, account number and initial balance to get started.
The interface of Money Manager Ex is very similar to that of any banking site, with the expense categories on the left that open summary reports.
Basically what can be added are:
- Money movements and therefore bank withdrawals, deposits and transfers.
For each of them you can also specify a beneficiary, a category, the date, a progressive number etc.
- Securities can be managed by creating a new account, an investment account .
- Assets are tangible assets that can have a expendable value (real estate, houses, jewelry and works of art for example).
- Recurring transactions are instead the bills or the collection of the monthly salary or any expense that is repeated every month on the same day.
By automating the recording of recurring expenses you can use the program to make spending forecasts in the future.
When all the resources and accounts have been set up, you can create a budget or an annual budget with a list of income expenses, bills and even invoices if you want to manage a business with VAT number.
The model of the program makes the insertions really very fast and not boring as one might expect from a management software, without mandatory fields and without getting lost in a thousand menus that are often superfluous even for business management.
Money Manager Ex can import QIF (Quicken) and CSV files so as to immediately create the expense and income items of the statement downloadable from the bank's website.
Classifying the transitions and transfers by specifying the categories is optional and can also be avoided even if, when going to make the final accounts, they become really important to make balance sheet summaries.
Most of the buttons on the left menu are automatic reports that will allow you to examine the financial situation in a graphical way, with statistics and graphs that represent the added value of Money Manager Ex.
You can see the balance of the accounts, where the money goes, where the money comes from, to whom our money goes and many other statistics.
Keeping expenses is always a tedious task but with this program it becomes almost fun but above all a quick job that will not waste time for the most busy.
Money Manager EX is one of the best free management and personal accounting programs and other similar programs are also on the list of the best programs for financial and investment management.
