Savings Management Software, a financial management software solution is a comprehensive tool that assists in managing various aspects of your daily financial activities. It helps in managing your money efficiently and handling tax filing tasks, maintaining accurate records of all income related to money flowing into or out of your bank accounts.
In this post, we review the aspects of Savings Management Software, what is the best software for financial management, fund management software solutions, and software cost savings.
Savings Management Software
If you’ve ever had the experience of coming into a large sum of money and not knowing what to do with it, then you know how important savings management software is. The right kind of software can help you organize your finances so that you can save more money and invest it wisely.
The benefits of savings management software
Savings management software helps you save money, plan for the future and make better financial decisions. It also helps you manage your money better so that you can understand your financial situation. This will allow you to take advantage of all the benefits that come with managing your savings effectively.
The best savings management software products
When choosing a savings management software product, you should consider the following factors:
- How much do you want to pay?
- How many people will be using it?
- Does it have all the features you need?
- Is it easy to use?
How to choose the right savings management software for you
When choosing the right savings management software for you, there are a few things to consider.
- Ease of use. You want something that is easy to use and will help you manage your money effectively.
- Security and reputation. Is the solution secure? Does it have a good reputation among its users? If not, look for another option.
- Savings focus. What does this platform do well in terms of helping people save money? A good savings management tool should be able to help you find ways to save time and money on recurring expenses as well as find ways to earn more income through passive income streams like interest-bearing accounts or investments
Savings management software can help you get your financial future in order.
We’ve all heard the word “Saving” and know it has something to do with not spending money. But what does it really mean? Saving is the act of putting money aside for future use, like buying a house or paying for your kids’ college education. We often save in case of emergencies, like losing our job or having an accident that leads to expensive medical bills.
We can also save because we want to buy something special someday—like a new car or computer, or even just a nicer apartment if we’re living in a cramped one now!
There are many different ways to save money: you might put cash away in your piggy bank every week; you could open up an online savings account at your bank; maybe you’ve even set aside some money by investing in stocks and bonds through mutual funds with your broker (or advisor).
what is the best software for financial management
Is finance management software really all that it claims to be? Can it really step in and help streamline key finance processes in your business?
And the crucial question: is it really worth investing in?
These are the questions we’ll take a look at, to see how well finance management software tools fit into workplaces today. Looking closely at the answers to these questions, we can delve into the true cruciality of finance management software, and whether it justifies your investment.
Top 6 Finance Management Software
Here are some of the best financial tools that you can start evaluating before choosing the one that suits you best:
1. QuickBooks
QuickBooks is a standard comprehensive financial management tool geared towards small and medium businesses and accountants. It helps you with bank reconciliation, invoices, tracking expenses, payroll, and advanced reporting. There are both cloud and on-premise solutions.
While on the more complex side, it’s powerful features offer a compelling reason if you usually deal with high volumes. A small business with limited requirement might find QB a bit overwhelming.
Suitable for: Accountants and Enterprises
Pricing: Quickbooks has multiple plans starting from $10/month.
2. Kissflow Finance & Ops Cloud
While not exactly a finance management tool, Kissflow is designed to help you develop a system of approval workflows for finance processes. There are pre-built apps for purchase orders, invoices, expense reimbursements or you can create your own, depending on your requirements with zero coding. With standardized approval flows and fairly automated processes, you can make finance process automation a complete breeze.
What sets Kissflow apart is that its visual interface lets you customize the apps based on your needs. There’s no coding required, regardless of the complexity. If your finance processes involve a lot of approvals and repetitive tasks, give Kissflow a try.
Suitable for: SMBs and Enterprises
3. Zoho Finance Plus
Zoho’s finance suite breaks down departmental silos and offers an end-to-end integrated platform for all your back-office operations: accounting, invoicing, inventory, expense management, and tax compliance. The suite delivers flexible, scalable, and secure applications to manage your entire finance process.
Every app is accessible from the rest making the usage seamless. The granular user roles limit access based on your needs and you can customize them to the smallest detail.
Suitable for: Small and medium businesses
Pricing: There’s a free 14-day trial after which the monthly pricing is at $149/organization.
4. Xero
Xero is an accounting tool that lets you create professional recurring invoices, reconcile bank and credit card statements. It also helps businesses with purchase and sales orders, contact management, payroll and inventory management.
Xero is light-weight and easy-to-use.
Suitable for: Small and medium businesses
Pricing: The starter plan starts at $20/month with optional purchases.
5. Oracle Financials Cloud
Oracle Financials Cloud is an ERP system that’s completely based on the cloud. It’s a scalable, comprehensive, and integrated ecosystem of finance tools. While on the expensive side, it might be a good choice for enterprises that look for more control and scalability.
Suitable for: Enterprises
Pricing: $600/user/month with a minimum of 10 users.
6. Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct’s applications are suitable for small and midsize companies, helping them manage the general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, cash management and order management. With an open API structure, you can integrate them with other business applications like CRM, payroll, or POS systems.
Suitable for: Though enterprises find the value, it may not be the same for small and medium businesses
Pricing: The base price of $5000/year makes it one of the costliest options in the market.
Key features of competent finance management software
Financial tracking
Web-based financial management software makes for transparency and complete real-time control. Transparency means that business analysis is simple, as is coordinating the finance workflow execution.
In practical terms, this means customizable dashboards, reports where you can set specific parameters to display, and relevant notifications sent to the right people in context.
Financial planning
Finance management software also takes care of this crucial facet: planning finances, and aligning them with the overarching business strategy of the organization. It provides the connection between data, tasks, and people. It also offers dedicated solution to finance planning like budget approvals.
By today, everyone who knows modern business agrees that automation is much more than fad or industry buzzword. With automated apps taking care of repetitive, predictable finance processes, you can drive up consistency and free up employees all at once.
fund management software solutions
The Best Investment Portfolio Management Software Makes Your Life Easier
Investors need the best portfolio trackers to monitor their mutual and exchange traded funds, individual stocks and bonds for many reasons. You want to examine your investment returns, fees, asset allocation, as well as plan for retirement and more. And you need the best personal investment software to do it right! Of course you can do it by hand or with an investment tracking spreadsheet, but with the excellent investment portfolio management software available, why bother? From free investment software, to a one-time payment or on-going fees, there has never been a better selection of investment software or stock portfolio tracking on the market. Both price and features matter and we’ll explore both.
*Disclosure: Please note that this article may contain affiliate links which means that – at zero cost to you – I might earn a commission if you sign up or buy through the affiliate link.
Best Free Investment Management Software for Individuals – Personal Capital Tutorial
We’ll start out with the free portfolio trackers and investment management software for individuals, next the investment and stock portfolio trackers that charge an ongoing fee. Embedded in many of the platforms is asset allocation software, to keep your investments in line with your goals and risk tolerance.
The best portfolio analyzer is one that meets your investing portfolio management, tracking and budget needs. We’ll cover investment tracking software, able to handle stock tracking, ETF and mutual fund trackers.
List of Best Portfolio Management Software
Free Portfolio Management Software
1. Personal Capital
Personal Capital may be the top free investment and portfolio management software for individuals. The platform, with mobile and desktop computer access has a load of features. The easy set-up takes a few minutes to sync your accounts after which your personalized dashboard is available. The Personal Capital finance dashboard incorporates all of your bank, credit card and investment accounts and gives you a 360 degree view of how your investments are performing along with other useful money information.
The Personal Capital portfolio tracking software and tools help you:
The investment check-up offers priceless tools – kind of like your best portfolio analyzer. The overriding question that the investment check-up answers is “Could your portfolio give you greater returns for a reasonable risk level?” The program answers this question by comparing your current asset allocation to the recommended target, and recommending improvements.
The retirement planner calculator tells you best and worst case retirement scenarios. It shows how much monthly spending your current portfolio will allow throughout retirement.
This is my “go to” resource to check on and analyze my investment performance, and income versus spending. It’s easy to use and automatically updates, unlike Quicken, (which I also use) where I must request an update to my portfolio. The net worth calculator even maintains an updated value of our home. And, while on the go – the portfolio management app is ideal for a quick check of your investment returns.
One of the best aspects of Personal Capital is how fast and seamlessly your accounts are linked! You can be up and running in minutes!
I was amazed at how fast my complicated investment portfolio was uploaded and analyzed. I have more than 10 accounts with multiple investments within each account. Here’s a sample image of a Personal Capital Dashboard with updated Net worth, cash flow and budgeting data.
I recently completed a retirement analysis, and increased my annual spending projections. The new retirement analysis showed that I’m still fine at the new spending level. It was fast and easy.
The only caveat with this tool is that you may need to field a call from a Personal Capital representative. Other than that, the tools are free to use. I consider Personal Capital a top contender for the best investment software. I appreciate how all of the accounts auto-populate so that I don’t need to input data. In fact, this free portfolio management software just might be superior to Quicken portfolio management software.
2. Mint
“Compare your portfolio to market benchmarks, and instantly see your asset allocation across all your investment accounts like 401(k), mutual funds, brokerage accounts, and even IRAs.” ~Mint free investment tracker
The popular and free Mint.com investment and money management web-based software has a lot going for it. With quick linking to your accounts, similar to Personal Capital, you get a quick overview of your financial picture. Mint tracks all of your financial accounts including credit, banking, investment and retirement. Mint also highlights your fees, so that you know how much of your money isn’t being invested for your future.
Mint offers these financial tools:
Mint claims to help “Get the right tools for your investment style.” The online portal offers tips and advice for both active and passive investors.
The Mint investment and portfolio tracking software is satisfactory for beginning investors seeking a free basic money management, saving, spending, budgeting, and tracking tool. Intermediate or sophisticated investors might prefer advanced stock portfolio tracking and management apps like Personal Capital or Quicken.
3. Quicken Premier 2022
Quicken’s been my go-to financial management software for decades and I continue to use both Quicken and Personal Capital to view and analyze our investment portfolios. Quicken launched an annual subscription model. This means that you need to renew annually or you’ll forfeit software updates. The program also has an online portfolio tracker app for on-the-go money management.
Similar to Personal Capital, after syncing your checking, saving, debt and investment accounts, you have a comprehensive financial management portal. The Quicken Premier platform is both basic money management, budgeting, debt tracking and cash management software as well as a comprehensive investment portfolio management program. The stock portfolio management software synchs with real time stock quotes and the Morningstar ® X Ray analysis tool.
Quicken premier investment management features include:
In addition to the investment capabilities there are robust income, expense, budgeting and money management capabilities. This all sounds great, but I’ve had problems downloading data from our bank account. I’m not certain if increased bank security is to blame or the Quicken program itself.
Quicken is only available as a subscription. They have discontinued their previous offers to own the program. I don’t love this extra cost, but it is consistent with many other software offers.
4. Investment Account Manager
Investment Account Manager software is sophisticated investment portfolio management software. The product was designed by professional money managers and used by investors globally since 1985. The goal of the software is to help you understand and manage your investment portfolios. The software for individuals is suitable for both newbies and seasoned investors. Actually, I used this software in one of it’s earlier iterations many years ago. (I reverted to Quicken due to Quicken’s ability to handle budgeting tasks along with investment management).
Investment Account Manager is designed for stock portfolio tracking and investment management, not budgeting, debt or other financial management tasks.
You can track an unlimited number of portfolios. Each investment portfolio is handled individually and transactions are segregated by account. This helps the investor to create portfolios by objective and track according to distinct parameters.
The reports section allows you to customize reports and even create reports that combine portfolios. For example, Investment Account Manager allows you to combine all portfolios and review your overall asset allocation (stocks, bonds, cash and other) and on a granular level by stock sector and size.
The data helps you determine if you’re meeting your investment goals. This pdf details the 20 distinct reports available through the Investment Account Manager. The reports include detailed cost basis data to customizable income reports and more.
As this software is for investment tracking only, you’ll find specific data for many types of assets including; cash, money market funds, US Government, agencies, and tax-exempt bonds, corporate bonds, preferred stocks, mutual funds, exchange traded funds, common stocks, options, and other investments.
Within the asset library, there’s detailed security data including:
You can download the data from your broker or input manually.
The rebalancing feature makes it easy to see if your portfolio is out of balance and what securities need to bought or sold to return to your preferred allocation. There’s even a sector weight allocation option.
Two more of my favorite features are benchmark comparisons and for individual stock owners, fundamental ratio analysis tools.
Additionally, Investment Account Manager also offers a professional version of the software for financial advisors.
There is so much meat in this software, that the serious investor and possibly the casual investor as well will benefit from the Investment Account Manager. The investment management software is compatible with the Windows operating system, and users can run the software on a Mac with windows emulating software.
You also get a 60 day free trial, which is quite generous! After the trial, the reduced fee is $99 per year and includes QuoteMedia data feed. Or, if you’d prefer not to renew annually, you can continue to use the software indefinitely, without access to program updates, tech support or the QuoteMedia data feed.
5. Morningstar Investor (Formerly) Portfolio Manager
This freemium portfolio analyzer allows investors to import or manually enter their holdings and gain valuable insights. The free Morningstar portfolio x-ray is one of the best investment tools and shows stock style diversification, sector and style breakdowns, geographical distributing and a summary of fees and expenses. This feature is also available through a Quicken membership, and the securities are already imported.
The Morningstar Portfolio Investor offers a free trial and then you’ll need to sign up for Morningstar premium, for continuing access.
The free Morningstar Portfolio Manager includes:
The premium investing portfolio management includes scores of features including: fund and stock screening, fundamental analysis ratios, portfolio x ray interpretation wih style, financial ratio, and expense analysis.
For more advanced investors, the premium subscription is well worth it. I’ve subscribed for years and use Morningstar not only for in depth portfolio analyzer but for fund and investment research. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial to the premium service. After that, the annual fee is $249 or $34.99 per month.
6. SigFig Portfolio Tracker
SigFig is a robo-advisor with a free online portfolio tracker. Although less comprehensive than Personal Capital, it’s worth a try. The free portfolio tracker offers:
Anyone can use the free SigFig investment manager. The tool offers mutual fund trackers and stock tracking software.
If you want to try their robo-advisory investment manager, SigFig is a competitive service and charges 0.25% AUM. Many low-fee robo-advisors require you to move all of your assets into the company account. SigFig offers portfolio management for investors with existing Fidelity, Schwab, or TD Ameritrade accounts. This is a convenient feature, especially if you have a larger portfolios and want to avoid the tax implications and complications of transferring your existing investments.
software cost savings
IT leaders are looking for ways to reduce spending to deal with the economic impacts of the current pandemic. Software costs, including SaaS, often represent as much as a quarter of IT budgets. While long-term contracts with major software vendors can make it difficult to unlock savings, there are several tips that can help quickly save on software and SaaS while also increasing your efficiency for the long term.
How much can I save?
On average, organizations waste approximately 30 percent of their software spend. By optimizing your software license positions and SaaS use, you can realize hard savings by avoiding purchasing or renewing unneeded licenses.
5 Tips to find software and SaaS savings
Tip 1: Start with large, upcoming software renewals or renegotiations
With much of your software spend locked into long-term enterprise contracts, your initial focus may be on contracts renewing in the next 12 months. However, you don’t have to wait for a renewal to ask to renegotiate with a vendor. In preparation for either scenario, it’s important to start by fully optimizing your use of the licenses you’ve purchased. This enables you to enter renewal negotiations in the strongest possible position. There are a number of areas you may be able to optimize your license usage, depending on the licensing rules of a particular software vendor and your internal policies. Examples include:
Tip 2: Find software running on zombies and idle servers
In the datacenter, you may find software running on zombie or idle servers. These are servers that are running but not used at all or are barely utilized. Software running on these servers is consuming software licenses. By eliminating zombie servers and eliminating or downsizing idle servers, you can reclaim the software licenses and also reduce maintenance costs for the servers.
Flexera analyzed data from 773 organizations and found that on average, 23 percent of servers were zombie or idle. In an organization with 5000 servers, savings averaged $1.5 million, not including software licenses.
Finding zombie and idle servers requires an analysis of infrastructure utilization (CPU, memory, storage, bandwidth) over a period of time. It’s important to monitor these servers over a month or longer to uncover peak demand that might happen on a weekly, monthly or even quarterly basis. Once you uncover these servers, you can take appropriate action, including deprovisioning software, rightsizing or decommissioning the server.
Tip 3: Look for underutilized SaaS
SaaS applications can be bought under contracts that range from by-the-month to three or more years. Your largest SaaS applications are likely under one- or three-year contracts, so focus on the ones that are up for renewal in the next 12 months. While the SaaS application itself can show you how many users you’ve authorized, it won’t tell you how much they’ve used the application over the last few weeks or months. In cases where there are several levels of user licenses for different levels of capabilities, the SaaS application won’t tell you which capabilities users actually use. Several common areas for waste include:
You can leverage SaaS management tools to uncover usage-level data, as shown below, and find opportunities to deprovision users. You can use automated policies to reclaim unused or underutilized licenses. Keep in mind that some SaaS vendors have contract provisions that prevent you from reducing the contract size on renewal. You may need to push back during negotiations to eliminate such clauses.
Tip 4: Eliminate waste hiding in shadow IT
One additional area for waste is SaaS applications or cloud services being bought directly by employees via credit cards and then submitted through expense reports. While these expenses may not hit the IT budget, they still represent potential wasted spend in the organization. There are several areas to look for:
A survey of CIOs by Symantec found that CIOs are only aware of a fraction of SaaS applications in their organization
Uncovering this waste will require analyzing data from expense reports. Because of the volume involved, it’ll be difficult to uncover this waste through manual approaches. A SaaS management tool can scan your expense data and compare it to a known catalog of SaaS applications, providing you with a detailed inventory of your shadow SaaS. Keep in mind that you’ll want to do this on a regular basis as some SaaS applications are billed less frequently than monthly and new shadow SaaS will also continue to appear.
Tip 5: Find savings in software licenses in the cloud
Many organizations aren’t fully tracking or optimizing their use of traditional software licenses running in cloud environments such as AWS, Azure or Google. It’s important that your asset management teams evaluate bring-your-own-license (BYOL) options for each of your cloud providers and taking advantage of any opportunities for savings. For example, if you bring Microsoft Windows or SQL server licenses to the Azure cloud, you can realize significant savings on your cloud bill through the Azure Hybrid Benefit. At the same time, certain software licenses such as Oracle database, can be more expensive to run in some clouds due to license restrictions. With this level of complexity, it’s important to evaluate the costs and determine the best options.
Technology Value Optimization
Reallocate spend. Reduce the risk of audits and security breaches. And chart the most effective path to the cloud. Get the most from every IT dollar.
Use of the Azure Hybrid Benefit can save 44 percent on cloud VMs in Azure
Optimize Your Use of Software and SaaS
In the face of the pandemic, the need to optimize costs has become ever more important. With software and SaaS consuming about 20 percent of overall IT budgets, optimizing your use of software can yield significant saving.
Flexera can help with software asset management and SaaS management solutions and expertise. Get help optimizing your software spend today.