Best Free Financial Planning Software

Having a plan for your finances is crucial, and a comprehensive financial plan may include budgeting, saving, investing, paying off debt and creating a roadmap to retirement. Working with a financial advisor can be helpful in creating your personal money plan, but DIY types might prefer to use a financial planning software instead. There are a multitude of options to choose from and each one has a different range of features. If you’re a financial advisor yourself, there are also plenty of software options that you can use to help you build plans for your clients.

A financial plan software can be defined as a program that helps user’s to enter the personal data into the computer and then provides suggestions for investment strategy depending upon user’s investment objectives. When it comes to financial planning, people fall short of ideas on how they should go about it. It is not something that you do once in your life or at one particular age. Financial planning is important for all ages and stages of life. Like most small business owners, you know that your success as a small business owner depends on how well you manage your cash flow. In order to be successful at managing your finances, you need to have an understanding of where your money comes from and how it’s being spent. A financial plan software is a tool for putting together a complete picture of the financial positions of an individual or business and determining realistic and optimistic future outcomes. There are many different types of financial plan software available, and we’ll help break down the top tools so you can find one that fits your unique needs.

Must-Have Features of a Financial Planning Software

Automation of General Accounting Procedures

The financial planning software you choose should be capable enough to streamline basic financial processes for your business like accounts payable/receivable, cash flow, purchases, general ledgers, payroll, etc.

Supports Global Financial Processes

Every country follows different laws and guidelines pertaining to finance, and so their financial processes differ. The financial planning software you select should support multiple languages, currencies, and country-specific laws and guidelines.

Tracking Income & Expenditure

Financial management software should be able to track and monitor your company’s income and expenditure across different divisions and locations in an accurate manner. It should be able to streamline the entire cash flow management to provide a real-time view of the financial status of your organization.

Strategic Planning

The use of financial planning software that allows you to prepare accurate strategic plans based on market conditions, acquisitions, liabilities, predicted expenses, profit & loss, etc., can positively impact the financial status of your organization and allows it to grow at an exponential level.

Real-Time Custom Reports

The financial planning software you select should have the ability to provide real-time custom reports showing the exact financial position of the organization, which can help in preparing accurate financial plans that prove to be successful.

These are the must-have features of financial planning software, but it is also essential to consider your business requirements before you select your financial planning software. So, here is the list of the best 8 free and open source financial planning solutions with required details and a comparison chart making your selection process an easy task. You can consider deploying one among these financial planning tools in your business, helping you to meet your financial goals without making huge investments.

Why Should You Have A Financial Plan?

Helps you understand your current financial situation. Everything from expenses, how you’re spending money, current income, savings, investments, etc.
Ensures you are setting various financial goals for yourself and your family. Like maybe how much you want to be saving, what you want to invest for retirement, etc.
A financial plan will help you develop a timeline on goals, if they are realistic, and information to help you stay on track.
It will help you understand your cash flow and spending habits, so you no longer have to guess or manage off the top of your head.
It can help you catch money mistakes you are making currently.
Your plan can also show your financial risks you may not have even been aware of before.
Naturally, a financial plan will help you build wealth. Your plan keeps you informed, making better saving, spending, and investing decisions that grow your net worth.
You become more knowledgeable with finances and more savvy with your money

Firefly III

Firefly III is a free and open source financial planning software that helps you in keeping track of your expenses, income, budget, and everything related to your funds. It can even track your incoming and outgoing pertaining to your bank accounts, shared household accounts, and credit cards. It is a wonderful financial planning tool used for organizing money as it works on a basic principle that if you know where your money is going, you can stop it from going there.

(firefly-iii.org)

Key Features

Works based on double-entry bookkeeping concept
Allows managing the different types of accounts (savings, current, credit cards, loan, etc.)
Ability to manage transactions using categories
Can generate and view income & expenditure reports
Facilitates 2-factor authentication for security
Allows easy navigation through records
Enables a historical view of the transactions of past month or year

Personal Capital

Personal Capital is a popular financial planning software option for both beginners and those more experienced with money management. The free version of the software includes all the features necessary for basic financial planning, including:

The ability to link all of your financial accounts, including retirement and investment accounts, in one place
A “net worth” tracker
A tool to find hidden fees you might be paying for your investments
Budgeting and cash flow tools to track spending
Goal trackers for your spending and savings targets
Tools for forecasting retirement and college savings outcomes

These features are included in the software at no charge and offer a comprehensive view of your finances. If you need help choosing investments, Personal Capital also offers robo-advisor wealth management services for a fee.

Savology

One of the best free financial planning software out right now is Savology. The company was only founded in 2019 and has already helped over 10,000 people with their financial planning efforts. And just recently they raised money from prominent investors in the financial industry to expand their reach to more households looking for financial help.

According to their recent press release, Savology plans to use this funding to help 100,000 users build free financial plans this year.

Skrooge

Skrooge powered by KDE, allows you to manage your personal finances. It is one of the best tools used for entering, monitoring, and analyzing your expenses. It can work on multiple platforms like Windows, Mac OS, Linux, BSD, and Solaris. It can also support multiple currencies from all over the world. It can save your time spent on data entry, as it is capable of importing data from spreadsheets, and even bank’s website.

Key Features

Allows managing the multiple payees
Includes infinite category levels
Allows you to import transactions from the bank’s website
Helps in managing budgets by applying rules
Allows you to track expected refunds
Can generate periodic reports showing the financial position of your business

Quicken

Quicken offers multiple financial planning software solutions, depending on what exactly you want to do with your money. The Starter version, for example, lets you view all of your accounts in one place, create a budget, track your spending, manage your bills and categorize your purchases.

If you want to take a deeper dive into your finances, the Premier version may be more appropriate. This version lets you do everything the Starter version does, while also adding in some additional features and tools, such as:

The ability to track loans, investment and retirement accounts in one place
Access to Morningstar’s® Portfolio X-ray® tool
Automatic bill pay
Market comparison and investment tax planning tools

There’s also the Home & Business version, which might be helpful if you need a streamlined way to manage business and personal finances.

eMoney Advisor

eMoney Advisor offers a hefty suite of financial planning services for advisor firms and large advisory enterprises. The program is based around three distinct packages of services (Plus, Pro and Premier), with a fourth tier reserved for customized enterprise relationships.

Customers who purchase the Plus tier receive bare-bones access to eMoney’s customer website and mobile app, foundational financial planning services and advanced financial analytics. If you need more than that, the Pro version upgrades the basic foundational financial planning services for an advanced level, in addition to advanced financial analytics. Premier customers gain access to everything that eMoney has to offer.

eMoney Advisor can be integrated with other popular advisory services from Morningstar, Salesforce, Fidelity, Envestnet and more.

HomeBank

HomeBank is a free and open source personal finance software that is easy to use. It can help analyze finance and budget in-depth using powerful filtering tools and appealing charts. It can be translated in around 56 languages and can work in almost all common devices using operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and was ported by 3rd party to MacOSX.

(homebank.free.fr)