The Various Categories Of Free Personal Finance Software
Today you have a plethora of free personal finance software available for the management of your family's financial records, transactions, and calculations. Free personal finance software is available to you under various categories, details of which are described below. Completely free personal finance software - A wide variety of completely free personal finance software can be easily searched for on the Internet. You can easily download it from software providers' web sites free on to your personal desktop or laptop.
Free software applications under this category are not as rich in features as provided by commercial applications under the category. However, they are nevertheless mostly sufficient for simple accounting purposes that most families look for in the US. You need not go in for commercial personal finance software unless your needs go beyond expense accounting, budgeting, and maintenance of a database of your banking transactions. Free personal finance software is available for mostly the Windows platform on personal computers. This is because it comprises the lion's share of the OS (operating system) market on home based computers. AceMoney Lite is one such application. This is not to say that Linux-compatible free personal finance software or that for Mac OS is not available at all. It is and some of the Windows-compatible software applications under this category additionally do run on the two operating systems. Open source software - This is another category of free personal finance desktop software that you can download freely. This category of software is mostly made for the Linux OS platform. GnuCash is just one example of such an application. It is made for the GNU/Linux, BSD platform. There are several other personal finance applications available to you under this category. Open source software is one for which the developer provides you the source code for the program so that you can develop it even further. The great aspect about it is that the source code for the program is also provided free to you along with the application. For the GnuCash personal finance software you are expected to donate an amount to the GNU foundation, which has developed it. Web-based free personal finance software - An example of a web-based tool that comes under this category is Mint.com. This award winning software is entirely free for you to access online. Although it is not rich in features, it helps you to perform most of your personal finance related accounting work without any hitches. It contains budgeting tools and setting up an online account using it is just a cinch. Its only cons are that cash transactions cannot be entered and that transaction categories need to be edited in respect of detailed budgeting. Shareware can be used free temporarily usually for a thirty day period. This form of free personal finance software is basically a commercial personal finance application and is offered to you free for a specified period to enable you to assess its features before you take a buy decision. |
