Desktop personal finance software for Mac is a collection of tools that helps you to digitally manage your financial data. It includes features to help you organize an overview of your accounts and transactions and can automatically connect with banks, credit card companies and brokerages
This article will tell you about free desktop personal finance software for mac. The best software for personal finance mac may be different from the others. To get a full picture of the situation and understand what makes these applications so good, we need to look at both sides of the coin.
Desktop personal finance software for Mac is an exciting new product that allows Mac users to seamlessly organize their finances whether that be managing bills or viewing account balances. The software will enable Mac owners to have all their relevant financial data in one place and accessible from any location by utilizing the cloud.
Personal Capital took top honors on our list because it provides so many different services. It offers a full wealth management service, which will handle complete investment management of various investment accounts. This is a premium service, but Personal Capital also has free personal finance software.
What is the Best Personal Finance Software?
To narrow down the best software for your needs, you have to ask yourself what you most need – personal finance is a broad term. Possible uses include budgeting, saving, investing, taxes, and bill management.
Some software focuses on one particular area, while others can tackle all of them at once.
You should also ask yourself whether you’re willing to pay for software; this will probably depend on the types of features you’re looking for. If you want to be able to track and categorize your money and do the basics, the free software will probably suffice.
If you’re looking for guidance, sophisticated features, or you’re a small business owner, you’ll need to upgrade to paid software.
The free version not only offers the ability to aggregate all your financial accounts on the platform, but it also provides budgeting capability. But maybe even more interesting is the fact that the free version also provides a significant amount of investing advice.
For example, it could help you in managing your overall investments, but also drill down into specifics, such as the fees you’re paying in your 401(k) plan.
Personal Capital may not be the very best in all categories, but it’s a combination of all the services it offers that makes it Number 1.
Try nowor read ourfull Personal Capital review
Runner-up: Quicken Premier
Much like Personal Capital, Quicken Premier offers both budgeting and investment features. But the platform has a strong emphasis on investments. Unlike Personal Capital, Quicken Premier doesn’t have a free version. But they charge a small annual fee for the service, which includes considerably more investment tools than Personal Capital provides.
In addition to helping you to maximize your investment worth, it also helps you to minimize your taxes. It does this by making sure you’ll get the maximum tax benefits with prepared reports, as well as tracking cost basis and estimated capital gains, to help you make trading decisions.
Our Selection Methodology
What makes it so difficult to narrow down a relatively small number of personal finance software plans is the sheer number that is available today. There are dozens, and each has its own specialization or specific flavor. In producing this list, we decided to emphasize the following criteria:
- Personal finance software available specifically for Mac owners
- Software that’s strong in a particular specialization
- Offers different services that would be of interest to most users
- Software costs
- Reviews from other sites (a consistent pattern of less than favorable reviews eliminated certain software)
- Personal experience in using some of the software
Our list of the best personal finance software for Mac was created with these guidelines in mind.
Top 6 Best Personal Finance Software for Mac
1. Personal Capital
Personal Capital is available for both Windows and Mac. And it’s one of the very best personal finance software ever created. This is because Personal Capital excels in both budgeting and investing.
Budgeting software is available through their Free Personal Software. You can add a variety of different accounts to the platform, including investments, loans, and bank accounts. It offers investment tracking, a retirement planner, a 401(k) fee analyzer, and an investment check-up tool that monitors the health of your investment allocation.
But if you decide you want more specific investment services, such as direct investment management, that’s available through Personal Capital Wealth Management. It provides full management services of your investments in various accounts.
But the downsides of the Wealth Management Service are that it does require a minimum of $100,000 to participate, and it has a high annual management fee 0.89% of funds under management, which is well above the typical range for robo-advisors.
Visit Personal Capital or read the Full Personal Capital Review
2. Quicken Premier
Quicken Premier offers both budgeting and investing, but it has a strong emphasis in favor of investing. It charges a flat annual fee of $67.49, and it packs a whole lot of investment services in that fee.
Quicken Premier provides an incredible lineup of investment tools including:
- Informed buy/sell decisions
- Unrealized gains
- Continuous quotes
- Printable and exportable portfolios
- Investment performance displays
On the budgeting side, Quicken Premier enables you to view balances, budgets, accounts and transactions, track spending trends, and search your transaction history. You can also sync your data across your desktop, web, and mobile devices.
3. YNAB
YNAB is one of the most popular budgeting software programs available, and for good reason. They provide you with a simple four-step process to manage your money:
- Give Every Dollar a Job: Here you decide what every dollar in your budget will do between now and your next paycheck.
- Embrace Your True Expenses: This step encourages you to prepare for large, future expenses, that way you’re ready before they arrive and they won’t upset your budget.
- Roll With the Punches: This step helps you to prepare for the unexpected. If one budget item will be high, you simply move funds from other envelopes into that one. It enables you to deal with a higher expense category, without upsetting your overall budget.
- Age Your Money: This is one of the features makes YNAB unique in the budgeting software world. This step moves you towards spending money today that you earned last month. That is, it enables you to put your income/checking account one month ahead of your expenses.
YNAB charges $14.99 per month for the service, which is pricey, but you do get a 34-day free trial. The company claims new budgeters save $600 by the second month, and more than $6,000 the first year by using the service.
4. Mvelopes
Mvelopes is primarily a budgeting software. It enables you to connect unlimited accounts, and provides real-time budgeting, with automatic transaction syncing so you’ll stay up to date on your spending activity.
But the stand-out feature of this software is that you get access to financial coaching.
Every three months, you’ll get a session with a personal finance trainer, who will provide guidance and up-to-the-minute feedback on your progress. This will provide you with live support, which may be exactly the motivation you need.
Mvelopes offers three different plans:
- Basic – $5.97 per month
- Premier – $9.97 per month
- Plus – $19.97 per month
For most people, the Basic service will be sufficient. It provides unlimited envelopes and financial institution accounts, automatic transaction importing and account balance monitoring, live chat and knowledge base, and interactive reports. But if you need help specifically with debt issues, you can sign up for the Premier plan, which has specific debt reduction features.
If you want to maximize direct personal assistance, the Complete plan offers a dedicated personal coach, as well as a personalized financial plan and a quarterly meeting with a financial coach.
5. TurboTax
TurboTax is a bit different than the other software on this list, in that it doesn’t get involved in budgeting or investing. But it does focus on one critical aspect of personal finance, and that’s the preparation of your income tax return. And that’s what TurboTax does better than any other software available.
TurboTax is available for both Windows and Mac, and it’s a service well worth having. Not only does it cost a fraction of what you will pay a professional tax preparer, like a CPA, but it also gives you access to a tax expert, if you reach a point in the preparation process where you’re having difficulty.
TurboTax even gives you the option to purchase its Audit Defense Package to help you in case you’re audited. But should you decide – halfway through the preparation process – that you can’t complete your return, you can turn it over to a tax expert, who will complete the return by remotely accessing your computer.
It’s the closest thing to having a CPA prepare your tax return, but at a much lower price. And speaking of price, TurboTax offers five different packages, so you can match the service that’s appropriate for the complexity of your return.
Try TurboTax or read our full TurboTax review
Best For…
We recognize that when it comes to financial software, everyone has goals they hope to accomplish. For that reason, we’ve broken down the specializations where we think each of the six software excel. In most cases, each software serves several purposes, but the areas where each is at least a bit stronger than the others are as follows:
- Best All-around: Personal Capital
- Best for Investment Management: Quicken Premier
- Best for Financial Coaching: Mvelopes
- Best for Budgeting: YNAB
- Best for Income Tax Preparation: TurboTax
Factors to Consider
One of the complications in finding the best personal finance software for Mac or for Windows is that exactly which will serve you best will depend on your individual needs. In that regard, you should consider the following factors in making your decision:
- Decide which personal finance category you need the most help with: If it’s budgeting, YNAB may be the most appropriate, since that’s what they specialize in. But if you need the most help with investing, you may want to look carefully at Quicken Premier or Personal Capital.
- Determine how much personal assistance you may need: If you need help from a coach or a financial advisor in managing your budget, Mvelopes can provide it, and maybe a natural choice.
- Cost: This is always a factor, but maybe even more important if you’re on a very tight budget. You can consider using free budgeting software, such as Personal Capital. As your financial situation improves, you may want to move up to a premium service.
- If you already have significant investment assets: Budgeting may not be your primary concern, but investing might be. Quicken Premier and Personal Capital would be the better choice if you were in this category.
- You may need more than one software: That will certainly be true if you do your own taxes and need to use TurboTax. But you may also want to use YNAB for budgeting, or Quicken Premier for investing
Conclusion
Desktop personal finance software for mac is a crucial tool to help you better manage your finances. From budgeting to tracking investments or debts, there are many features available through various software titles. The best part about best free personal finance software for mac is that most of them are free and easy to use. Desktop Personal Finance Software for Mac is designed to be simple and intuitive to use, yet packed with features that make managing your personal finances a breeze.
The Mac platform is not an afterthought to the developers of Quicken and other personal finance software packages. They’re made with the Mac user in mind and they run beautifully on Intel-based Macs. The fact that Apple is a hardware manufacturer also means you can expect hardware manufacturers to release regular updates and patches for their products, often integrated into software updates.