Personal finance software comes in many varieties, each offering a specific set of financial tools. The simplest forms simply keep track of multiple bank accounts, including credit card accounts. The most complete versions offer tax tracking, investment tracking, budget analysis, electronic banking and a long list of other features. How much you need depends on your situation and how closely you want to track your finances.

Most banks now offer free electronic banking to their customers. Make sure that whichever program you choose, it is capable of taking advantage of electronic banking. The vast majority of programs offer this feature as standard so you shouldn’t have to look hard. With electronic banking, you can easily check your balance, automatically download statements, transfer funds among accounts and have all your information seamlessly transferred into your electronic account register.

The two powerhouses of financial software are Quicken from Intuit Corporation and Microsoft Money. Both companies offer several versions of the program and generally offer the same features. The interfaces are slightly different and one’s preference will likely come down to which one appeals to you most. New editions are released each year to account for changes in banking and tax law and owners of the previous year’s edition will receive discounts to upgrade.

Another option that is growing in popularity is software that is kept entirely online. You never actually download a program to your computer and can access your information from any computer connected to the Internet, including SmartPhones. This is referred to as “cloud computing.” Some websites offer a low monthly fee to use the software and other sites are free and entirely advertising supported. Some people prefer this method for its convenience and other people stay away from these programs due to security fears.

Once you begin to use personal finance software you’ll wonder how you ever managed your finances without it. People become addicted to seeing the computer generated reports of exactly where their money goes each month. They often find this makes it easier to create a budget and stick to it. Even if you simply want to keep your basic checking account up to date, personal finance software is worth the small price.

A small business is often bootstrapped so obviously there are no administrators who will run the reports so it is the owner’s job to keep a daily health check of his business.

MyBizHomepage, a Middleburg, Virginia-based startup, automatically uploads your QuickBooks data (2007 and 2008 versions only) to your own customizable web page, where you can keep an eye on your enterprise’s critical operational factors in real time. Many are standard-but-important business measures-the state of payables, receivables, cash flow and inventory.

In the above option you need to send your quickbook data to a third party which may be of little concern for few business owners.

InfoCaptor, is another Dashboard alternative where you can download the software on your PC and view the dashboards. It provides Expense trending, Sales trending and various gauges for financial ratios to alert you if your business is going off-track.

Sure, all of this information is available right in Quickbooks but the problem is you need to run seperate reports to get all these information. So lets say it typically takes 5 mins to run a typical report and if the business owner where to run say 10 different reports on a daily basis that itself accounts to a precious 50 mins of his/her time.