Whether you own a business or you just need to get your personal budget into shape, there is technology to make it easier, efficient, and effective. (Oh, and a little cuter if that’s what you want as well!) Here are a few tools worth checking out:
Mobile Personal Budgeting App: Mint
Mint is part of Intuit (you know, QuickBooks) so it is backed by a lot of know-how and security. It is also free unlike some budget apps that I have seen out there. There are products that are recommended to you while using the app, but I don’t find it disruptive or annoying.
- Pros: Trusted developer, ease of use, easy to create budget and track your spending, can connect to your banks and credit cards so that transactions are automatically entered into the app.
- Cons: There are a lot of budget categories to keep track of and splitting a charge among a few categories – like when you shop at Costco and get groceries and home electronics and prescriptions all in one trip – is cumbersome. This might not be a con for you. (This is not just a Mint app issue. I find that with any software that connects to your accounts.)
Go to https://mint.intuit.com/how-mint-works to find out more.
DIY Personal or Small Business Budget tech: Excel, Sheets or Numbers
Your go-to spreadsheet will have templates for budgets and tracking expenses. Also, you can save your bank and credit card statements as a csv and import it into your spreadsheet program.
- Pros: You already have this, there are cool templates to choose from, pretty easy to set up, more flexibility on how you want to categorize your income and expenses, and there are a lot of video tutorials to help as well.
- Cons: You can’t directly connect to your bank and credit card to get your transactions.
Canva
Create posters to presentations as well as a lot of printing options as well. It is free to use but has an upgrade which has some worthwhile and helpful features.
- Pros: A lot of good looking designs with different layouts to choose from, you can get most for free, you can grab a template and use as is or edit it to fit your needs.
- Cons: The templates are best to print and then write in by hand which is a con only if you don’t like writing in your transactions. This is for DIY budgeting.
Go to www.canva.com for all kinds of design needs.
So get out there and budget!
Peace and Profitability,
Your Peeps at Gallus Inc