Finances Software what's good?

Life Technology
1

Something like Quicken. If you have funds, pensions, and such; is it worth it to use one of these or just a spreadsheet like Excel? If they could automatically link to my account and update the balance it would be worth it.

My idea of investing is just to buy something and then forget about it, but my taitai says I have to check it at least twice a month and give her a report. Bad idea, but I must obey.

2

Linking to your accounts would be difficult and will require customizing software with API access to the accounts, which you will never get due to security issues with banks, funds, etc.

Quicken is great if you have your own company and want the software to create the financials for you.

All you need is excel and copy paste your info into it from you account. it is the cheapest way.

3

Hey, I’m trying out AceMoney right now.

Simple, but effective.

Kenneth

4

You probably meant QuickBooks for small businesses.

The problem with Quicken (which I’ve been using for 15 years) is that it’s based on a checkbook paradigm. As checking accounts aren’t popular in Taiwan, I’ve found using Quicken here to be, well, less than satisfactory.

Anyone have experience with personal financial software that works well in a Taiwanese context?

Kaiwen

5

Call me old fashioned but what’s wrong with pen and paper 1.0?

6

Ah, yes. Used to use that. Some of my favorite features were:

  • math mistakes
  • manual categorization of expenses
  • manual tracking of credit card expenses
  • no built in budget tracking
  • Manual tax preparation
  • Manual bill paying
  • Manual account reconciliation
  • No investment planning
  • Repititous manual entry of regular expenses
  • Constantly forgotten payments (as my wife says, “If you don’t remember it, you’ll probably forget it”)
  • And my favorite feature: illegible handwriting