But the downside to most free financial apps is that you’ll see lots of ads. The Mint mobile app has a lot of functionality, allowing you to check account balances and monthly budgets. You can set alerts for unusual charges, create goals, and even get a free credit score. Once Mint aggregates your transactions, you can easily categorize them, create a budget, and even set up automatic bill payments. It’s free to sign up and connect your financial accounts, such as a bank, credit card, loans, and investments through an easy-to-use dashboard. Mint is one of the original web-based personal finance management programs. Every week I import new transactions and make sure they’re categorized correctly, especially those related to taxes, so I can easily create reports at tax time. Quicken has far more features than I’ll ever use, but it’s my favorite way to manage money. And there are Quicken mobile apps to sync up with your desktop version, although you can’t see all your data.

You can enter transactions manually into Quicken if you don’t want to connect to your financial accounts online.

It helps you manage a small business or freelance work by separating personal and business expenses, emailing custom invoices with payment links, and tracking business tax deductions. You can use Quicken on your PC or Mac, but PC users can also get a Home & Business version for $100 per year. Upgrading to Deluxe ($50) or Premier ($75) gives you the Starter features plus customizable budgeting, loan tracking, investment tracking and analysis, bill pay, and online backup. The Starter version gives you a lot, including automatic expense categorization, limited budget tracking, and a bill dashboard, for $35 per year. Like many companies, they’ve moved to a subscription model where you pay an annual fee and get automatic updates for new features and services. They have a suite of products that connect to multiple types of accounts, such as banks, credit cards, lenders, and investments, to aggregate your transactions.

Quicken has been around a long time and is considered the gold standard in personal finance software.

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