One Money Design

You might say being in the software industry for 11 and 1/2 years and having a passion for personal finance has sparked a deep interest in me for personal finance technology and how it can help people manage money wisely.  Most of us know these technologies as software either offered as a service on the internet or for installation on your computer.  Most of the trend today, especially for new users of software seems to be going towards the online service space. And why not?  Many of these products are offering baseline services for free.

I know that as a personal finance software user, there are certain features I can’t live without.  They allow me to do my job as a family CFO (Chief Financial Officer) more efficiently (I’m all about saving time) and effectively.  For example, such features help provide the precision needed to crunch the numbers for 12 months of spending in one area of the family budget. 

What are these features?  What makes them so important to performing my work as a family CFO?  I’ve started a list of the features we typically can’t live without as well as the nice to have’s.  These are the features that could be used to measure the value of any personal finance software service or package before purchasing or signing up. 

So, where am I going?  I’m going to use a baseline list to explore different personal finance software on the market.  The findings will be presented in my posts under the personal finance software category from time to time.  But first…

Here’s the initial list of must have features (and some nice to have’s).

Budgeting: 

• Can create a budget or spending plan with categories.
• Can track expenses against categories.
• Can split transactions to multiple categories.

Banking:

• Download accounts, balances and transactions from financial institutions.
• Ability to reconcile manually entered transactions with transactions downloaded from financial institution.

Bill Pay:

• Pay bills from any account.

Debt Management:

• Set up a debt plan or pay off schedule.
• Download accounts, balances and transactions from financial institutions.

Reports:

• Cash flow report.
• Ability to view and print a monthly budget.

Social Networking:

• Ability to network with other users of the software and learn from their spending decisions.
• Ability to see spending comparisions with other users across locations.

Savings:

• Mechanism or ability to show savings based on transactions for financial institutions being used, i.e., lower rate on credit cards, etc.

Investing:

• Provides features for reviewing individual investments and performance.
• Provides capability to plan for the future, i.e., retirement calculator.

Alerts:

• Alerted when thresholds have been or are close to being met.

Mobility:

• Ability to use software on a mobile device such as a Blackberry or iPhone.

Other:

• Should be relatively easy to set up and use for all software skill levels.
• Support:  users forums or a customer service option must be available.
• Provides a way to back up and store data.

And what about you?  If you lost your computer or access to the internet today would you still be able to manage your finances?   Probably, but not without calling your bank to get your current balance, entering it into a new checkbook register (after you had to go pick one up at the bank), writing out your monthly budget and then begin to track your expenses in your spending notebook. 

Relax!  Go ahead and check your surge protector, make sure your internet service provider payments are current and back up your data.  Then…

What features would you like to see on this list that might be missing?  Which features make the difference for you or would be ideal to have in your personal finance sofware solution?

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