So, let me first clarify who the "rest of us" are. The segment I am referring to do not live in the US and can't afford Microsoft Money or Quicken, and hence are primarily interested in "freeware" or open source software. A typical user in my mind has more than one bank account (possibly in different currencies); he has some cash in hand (again, possibly a few notes in any other currency lying in his drawer); he has some liabilities in the form of house loan, etc. The purpose of the tool should be to show the current financial position to the user. Requirements can further be elaborated as follows:
- The software should be (absolutely) free. So, Microsoft Money, Quicken and Money Dance are out.
- It should support multiple currencies, and should ideally fetch the exchange rates automatically from some central internet server.
- It should provide support for opening different kinds of asset accounts (bank account, cash in hand, etc.) as well as liability accounts (such as home loan, car loan, etc.).
- The bank where any accounts are maintained doesn't provide live access to the account statement to these tools. That is, there should be an option to manually do all kind of entries.
Free Online Finance Tools
Unfortunately, mint.com is only for the US people, and wesabe.com no longer exists. Frustrated, I tried both yodlee.com as well as moneytrackin.com, and found several important features missing.Yodlee's problem is that it's too much focused on "online integration with your bank and credit card companies." The option to create a manual account is hidden deep down (i.e., the usability is poor as if the feature is of extremely low important). Moreover, when you are about to create a new account the currency options are limited to 7-8 different currencies. It fails the criteria test above, and doesn't fit my purpose.
And MoneyTrackin's problem is that it's overly simplistic---e.g., in order to create a liability account (such as home loan), you have to enter the balance in negative. The nice thing about MoneyTrackin' is that it efficiently handles multiple currencies (automatically fetches the exchange rates and shows your dashboard in the base currency). Another bad thing about MoneyTrackin' is that too much space is being utilized by ads.
Despite its shortcomings, if you want an online free personal finance application, MoneyTrackin' comes close.
Free Desktop Personal Finance Tools
Having no luck with online tools I tried GnuCash, Money Manager Ex and Grisbi. Amongst these, Grisbi crashed several times. So, it's out. Money Manager Ex seemed good but it doesn't have the concept of Liability Accounts (loans, etc.). The usability of Money Manager Ex can be improved quite considerably. So, it works but making posting entries into the accounts is extremely cumbersome.Finally, GnuCash was tried, and it has quite a few interesting things. It wins hands down amongst in free personal finance tools with a minor caveat: it's more than personal finance; it support complete dual entry accounting system. And hence, there is a learning curve here for a novice user.
Excel is still great, even with some manual maintenance :)
ReplyDeleteNice reviews
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if by free you mean free as in beer or as in speech. If it's the latter, MS Money is actually free now. You can download a copy from http://www.microsoft.com/money/sunset.mspx. Of course, you don't get integration with the banks for automatically downloading transactions, but if you're willing to live with that and are on Windows, it's a pretty decent piece of software.
ReplyDeleteI can see where you are going with this thread. Really happy to see you have found the golden road to Adsense revenues. Post long over due on my side...How many hits/pageviews so far?
ReplyDeleteJawwad
Hi Jawwad,
ReplyDeleteI have been experimenting with Adsense on this blog. I'll utilize the knowledge somewhere else. The earnings with just 2000 visitors a month is peanuts. Moreover, the CTR as well as the value per click is going down with passage of time. I am clueless why this is happening.
Any ways, I have not posted about one recent experience with the post title "One Reason Google will Never Fail." This was a hot topic on Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) and I thought that I should post something relevant and see the impact. I got around 230 page views that day...highest so far.
Very interesting and helpful comparison. I was about to google to see if someone has done this analysis but then I found this post in my own Google Reader blog list. I have downloaded both Gnu Cash and MS Money and will update here in comments on my experience with both.
ReplyDeleteRe Google Adsense: I am not even novice in this field and myself learning the trade in my blog (99rule.blogspot.com) but I just want to suggest may be you should play with positioning of ads in your blog to get better CTR, like for example, you can display an ad right under the Post heading or display an ad somewhere in middle of text in these long posts (see for exmaple: http://pakistaniat.com/2010/11/24/best-blog-south-asia-pakistan/)
ReplyDeleteJust my two cents.