Personal Finance Software Reviews

With the addition of the MoneyWell  review that was finished this week, there are now an equal number of personal finance software reviews for Windows-based computers and Macs.   Lately I’ve reviewed more Mac applications to as to give visitors to the site a decent number of options regardless of the operating systems that they use.

If you’re not sure if you want to read the whole 2,539 word MoneyWell review, this post will introduce you to the software and give you a general summary of the full review.

MoneyWell is personal finance software built for the Mac.  And like most software for the Mac, MoneyWell feels very solid and bug free.  The company who brings you MoneyWell, No Thirst Software LLC, is a small, yet reputable company.  The software is backed by a good 60-day money back guarantee and also offers a free trial (up to 200 transactions).  So either way, you should be covered if you find you don’t like the software afterall.

MoneyWell’s Single Window

MoneyWell uses a single-window interface to display all of your finance data including past transactions, bucket (or envelope) amounts, graphs displaying your cash flow, and an area to enter transaction details.  A picture is worth a thousand words and their screenshot (from their website) probably shows it best:

Envelope Bucket Budgeting

What I like about MoneyWell is that it uses the time-tested budgeting methodology knows as “envelope” budgeting.  Of course, MoneyWell puts it’s own twist on it and uses buckets, rather that envelopes, but the idea and theory is still the same.  Those who have used envelope budgeting can attest to the true effectiveness of the system.  It helps you to prioritize spending and savings habits and encourages you to think through exactly where you money needs to go throughout the month.  I’ve used it for years and will never go back.

The MoneyWell software is fairly intuitive, allowing someone new to the application to learn it fairly quickly.  One of most notable features is that it allows you to connect directly to your bank to import transactions.  This is something that most envelope budgeting programs don’t yet do.

Overall, I thought MoneyWell was a nice piece of software.  There were little things that I thought could be done differently or better (for example, I personally was wanting a little more options in terms of graphs and reports, but I didn’t think it was a deal breaker), but I’m sure that those that use the system will find that it helps them to better manage their finances.

The cost is $49.99, but it has a free trial.  So give it a spin and see if it meets your needs.

If you’d like to read the full MoneyWell review and walkthrough, you can find it here.

*A big thanks goes out to those who featured the MoneyWell related posts on their websites.  The full MoneyWell review was featured on AllFinancalMatters.com and this summary was featured on YesIAmCheap.com.

This review is certainly a tangent from my normal personal finance software reviews, but I thought that some of my readers would benefit from a review of some new software that I’ve been using for help with this website.  Many of you have websites or blogs of your own and as such, may have dabbled a bit in marketing your site or trying to get it to rank better in the search engines in order to gain traffic.

If this is you, you may want to check out two pieces of software that I’ve found extremely helpful in 1. tracking my website’s rankings and 2. building incoming links to the site in order to help with search engine ranking.  One is called Advanced Web Ranking and the other is Advanced Link Manager.  Both pieces of software are made by Caphyon and run on Windows, Mac or Linux.

Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking is a very powerful piece of software that can do just about anything (related to website ranking, of course) that you want it to.  To give you an idea of how complex the program can be, here’s a screenshot (click images to enlarge):

You can see that the program looks quite complicated, but after spending just a little time with it, you’ll quickly get to know your way around and what was once seen as “complicated” turns into “powerful.”

Want to know just a few things that you can with Advanced Web Ranking?  Here’s a screenshot of their “Assistant”:

As you can see, there are a myriad of things that you can do within Advanced Web Ranking (AWR).  Want to view your ranking changes over the past month? No problem.  Want to do some detailed analysis on the rankings of competitor websites? You got it.  Need some suggestions for new keywords that you may want to go after? AWR has you covered.

Now, for most people with small websites or blogs, this may be overkill.  And for those folks, there are plenty of inexpensive and even free web ranking monitoring services available.  But for those who love to have virtually all data points relating to website rankings at their fingertips, I’m not sure if AWR can be beat.

Being that it would be virtually impossible for me to do a full walkthrough and highlight each of its features, let me just mention a few of the things I’ve grown to love about AWR:

The Amount of Information: AWR goes out and fetches loads of data for the keywords and the websites that you’ve chosen.  And while the data can take some time to be gathered (which is a good thing, in a way, because it does it in a “human emulated” manner so it’s more search engine friendly), it’s well worth the wait because when you’re done you can analyze the information to virtually no end.  For those data heads out there, you’ll love the power of AWR.

Scheduled Updates: If you don’t like waiting for the data to be gathered each time, all you have to do is schedule your ranking updates on any recurring schedule that you’d like and AWR does at all in the background for you.  AWR doesn’t even have to be running.  You can even schedule the updates to occur at night so you’ll have all your data ready and waiting for you in the morning.

Interactive Reports: The interactive reports that AWR supplies you are really nice.  For those that may be in charge of web marketing for their company, you’ll find these quite handy for providing professional looking reports to your boss.  And yes, you can even schedule these reports to be created and emailed automatically so you don’t have to lift a finger.

Keyword Suggestion Tools: Another great feature is the keyword research tool within the application.  AWR allows you to use the tools provided by Google, WordTracker, and Yahoo to research keywords.  In addition, it has some neat functionality in terms of picking and choosing and storing your keywords so they go right into AWR.

For an overview of all the other features (and believe me, they are many), go to the features page of their website.  Or to see an example of how AWR can really help you, go to the features walkthrough.

Advanced Link Manager

Now this is the one that most webmasters could get really excited about.  At least those that are actively marketing their website.  Advanced Link Manager (ALM) essentially can act as your hub for all things link building.  It really is a “link manager.”  The amount of data it brings in is almost mind blowing.  But the information that’s then at your fingertips can be really powerful when you’re searching for new opportunities for building links and creating relationships with other websites.

Advanced Link Manager is no less powerful (nor seemingly complicated) than Advanced Web Ranking.  But the same is true, that after spending a little time, you’ll be able to navigate your way around rather easily.  Also, the websites for each piece of software have great walkthroughs and guides that are a huge help as you learn the system.

Here’s a screenshot of ALM (the screen shown is ‘Referrers’, which is their way of showing who all is linking to you):

Just to give you an example of some of the things you can quickly learn from a page such as this: I can see here that I have about 219 websites that are linking to mine.  Since I last updated the data (four days prior), 3 links have been removed.  And of the 219 links reported by ALM, 60 of which are “nofollow” links.

I can even quickly see what the anchor text is for any given link (in the screenshot, the link text for the squidoo link was “mvelopes review – mvelopes (finicity) money manager review.”  Also, a quick double-click and it opens the linking webpage in my browser.

What else can you do with Advanced Link Manager?  Maybe this will give you a bit more of an idea:

Again, it would be nigh impossible to go through each feature of ALM, so I’ll touch on a few of the things that really shine in the system.

Backlinks Evolution: Want a quick snapshot of how your link building efforts have paid off over the last 6 months?  Or see how your link popularity has grown?  This chart will show you the number of backlinks your site has, graphed over time.  You can choose to view links for your entire site or a single page.  You can even graph multiple pages against each other to compare.  Also, using the various categories built into ALM (and customizable by you), you can choose to see “Important” links, “Paid” links, “Blog” links, and many, many more.

Link Text: This screen gives you a break down of how many links you have for each keyword or anchor text.  This can be extremely helpful as you try to determine which keywords you should focus on in the future.  And yes, by selecting a keyword, you can see all the webpages that are linking to you with that anchor text.

Competitor Analysis: ALM has a myriad of tools that help you to analyze your competitors’ websites and see why they are ranking where they are.  It can gather the same information for your competitors’ sites that it can gather for yours, so with a little time you can really see what you need to do to pass up your competitors.

Finding Link Partners: One of ALM’s primary purposes is to help you find link partners that you can build a relationship with to eventually get a link.  There are many ways to do this within ALM, one of which is using it’s “Find Link Partners” wizard.  Basically it goes out and searches sites (based either on your chosen keywords or on your competitors) and finds the sites that you are most likely to want a link from.  From the many results that it returns, you can quickly filter them by PR, outbound links, and virtually any other way you want to find some great opportunities for new links.

Contact Information: For each webpage that ALM gathers, it can quickly retrieve the contact information for that website.  From within ALM, you can then email those webmasters to start building a relationship.  ALM tracks your emails and your progress with each site so you can always know where you are in the process of attaining a link.

Just like with Advanced Web Ranking, you can schedule updates and reports to your heart’s content.  I’ve really found ALM to be a powerful tool.  Overkill for most folks? Probably.  But for those who spend a large chunk of time marketing their website, Advanced Link Manager is sure to please.

For a much more complete listing and description of ALM’s features, go to their feature page.  Or, for an example to see how Advanced Link Manager could help you, go to the features walkthrough page.

A Few Notes on AWR and ALM

There are varying levels of the product, each with different price points (Standard, Professional, and Enterprise).  Most bloggers and small website owners probably wont need something so powerful and can certainly find cheaper alternatives that will fit their needs.  But for those that are in need of such advanced software, the prices are very reasonable.  Luckily, Caphyon is having a special where they offer free licenses for the software to those who write about their products on the web (hence, this post).

I do wish that ALM and AWR were more tightly integrated with each other.  It would be great to be able to glean even more information from the data of both products combined.

I had heard about, and have since experienced, the quality of customer service that Caphyon delivers as well.  Any time I’ve had a question or small error, I’ve been responded to very quickly on the forums and via email.  Hats off to Caphyon for doing so well in that regard.

Trust me when I say that I’ve barely scratched the surface of what both Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager have to offer.  To get a better feel for their true value, spend a little time on their respective websites or even give their free trial a whirl.  You can use the software, full-featured, for 30-days.

With the increasing popularity of Apple computers, more and more people are looking for personal finance software applications that will work on their Macs.  I usually get at least a couple of emails a week that mention the need for more budgeting software options for the Mac.  For that reason, I was excited to check out “Budget” by Snowmint.

Snowmint’s Budget is an envelope-based budgeting system that was originally created for the Mac (although there is now a Windows-based application as well).  In terms of true budgeting effectiveness, almost any system that uses the envelope methodology has the potential to drastically improve your money management skills.  The difference, then, comes in the performance of the software itself.  Is it easy to use?  Is it fast to use?  Is it intuitive and simple to learn?  Is it (close to) bug free?  These are all things that one should look into when trying various software solutions to help them in their budgeting efforts.

Snowmint’s Budget Review

So, how does Budget by Snowmint compare to the competition?  Be sure to check out my full Snowmint Budget review for all the details and the in-depth walkthrough.   But as a quick summary, lets look at the positives and negatives of Snowmint’s Budget:

The first thing that really stood out to me about Snowmint, was the degree to which they focused on customer service and backing up their product.  They offer an unconditional 60-day money back guarantee (on top of offering a free trial of the software), so you’re covered if you decide you don’t like the system after using it for a couple of months.  They strive to respond to customer emails within 24 hours and also have a large amount of product support (on the forums and FAQs) as well.  In short, everything that I was able to find pointed to the fact that Snowmint stands behind their product and are concerned primarily with making customers happy.  This is a great thing.

Another surprising thing that I noticed when test driving the software for a couple of days is that I didn’t run across a single bug in the software.  Now, you may be wondering why I might expect to find a bug in the software that’s being sold to the public.  In reality, most of the software that I’ve tested lately (especially on the Mac platform) have had at least minor bugs and somtimes rather large ones.  My hat goes off to Snowmint for providing very solid software.

As you may have read elsewhere on this site, I’m a huge fan of envelope budgeting or zero-based budgeting.  It’s a time-tested method that helps you to be accountable for each dollar made and each dollar spent.  I really like that Snowmint’s Budget uses this methodology to help manage your money.  Budget’s process of allocating money into the various envelopes (customizable by you) is quite intuitive and easy to use.  Spending money out of (entering transactions) the envelopes is similarly simple.

The main area that I thought needed some improvements was the transaction editing.  In general, it took longer than I thought was needed to enter each transaction.  Now, this issue is resolved if you download and import your bank transactions.  But if you plan on putting your transactions in the system manually each day or week, it may take a little longer than you wished.

Conclusion

All things considered, Budget by Snowmint is a solid peice of personal finance software that will help you better manage your money.  The envelope system that it uses is great.  The user interface is fairly intutive.  And the company behind the product seems reputable and willing to back up their product with a good guarantee and great support.  They offer a free trial, so if you’re looking for a good budgeting alternative for Macs (and Windows for that matter) consider giving Snowmint’s Budget a try.

*The full Snowmint Budget review was featured on MilitaryFinanceNetwork.com during the 84th Money Hacks Carnival.