Ace Money Software: A Personal Finance Manager

Ace Money personal finance software helps people quickly and easily manage multiple accounts of different types, such as, savings, credit cards, loans, debt accounts. It has about 100 predefined spending categories, such as food, rent, clothing, donations etc, with which you can set up budget limits for every category and track the difference between actual and budget values.

One can even track currency and stock values as they change on line, and track where their money goes with the aid of reports and pie charts. If your bank supports on line banking, download and import its information in QIF and OFX formats. You can also export your accounts and reports to HTML, Text and CSV formats and generate statements or perform complex statistical analysis in Excel. If you are worried about your privacy and security, rest easy, with Ace Money you can password protect your files.

Ace Money has a browser like feel to it with a top tool bar that has buttons like 'Back', 'Forward', 'Home', along with program specific buttons like 'Accounts', 'Portfolio' and 'Reports'. When you need to set up your account, go to 'Accounts | Add new...' , and input the account details, such as name, bank name, account number, starting balance and currency.

Dabble in the stock market? Then, click on 'Portfolio' window-with 'Stocks', and add 'New Investment', next locate the symbol of your stock on line. Make use of the various data sources - Google Finance and set the name, currency and price history using the 'Update' and 'Download' buttons.

For instance, if you have shares in 'Microsoft', input 'MS' for the symbol and click 'Download'-the name and price history will be automatically displayed and next time, just click update to get the latest stock prices. Add a 'New Transaction' for actions like buy, sell, dividend, re-invest, add and remove shares, set the number of shares, price, commission and total.

Track your gains daily with the 'Download prices' button and watch your shares as they ride the stock roller coaster. 'Banks' has a predefined list of banks, if your bank does not feature on the list, click 'New Bank' to input your bank. The user can also edit the details of any predefined bank.

With 'Payees' one can add all third party transactions, such as restaurants and stores. Just like banks, you can add, edit, delete and merge these payees. Similarly, 'Categories' lets you add, edit, delete and merge instances. You can create budget reports using bank, payee and category filters. Any bills or transactions that you record will be categorized with respect to account, payee, bank and category.

With 'Schedule' you can set bills or deposits on a periodic or non-periodic basis by specifying frequency, date, bill type, account name and type, payee, category and amount. 'Calendar' lets you view your outgoings and inflows in a month. Generate 'Reports' in predefined formats such as cash flow, last 30 day transactions, by criteria, category and sub category, payee and budget reports filtered by category. Some handy tools include calculators for loan, savings and mortgages, which compute the amount to be paid, depending on the loan amount, period of time, and the rate of interest.

A Small Tip

To change the default currency from US Dollars to Euro go to 'Tools | International Settings' and choose 'Euro from the 'Default Currency' drop down list Backup your data frequently, from 'Tools | Backup' and set up a weekly or monthly frequency for your backup drive or file.