Many business owners put effort into their business finances but sometimes they don’t put as much attention into their personal finances. This also goes for individuals and couples as well.
Fortunately, there is a better way to track your personal finances and you’ll only need minimal accounting skills. We’ll look at two options but really answer if QuickBooks is a good option for personal finances.
Using QuickBooks for Personal Finances (What to Know)
QuickBooks is one of the best solutions for keeping track of personal finances. When we are talking about personal finances, in this case it is mainly your income and expenses.
This can be from your job’s income, rentals or just about anything on the income side. Expenses are things such as groceries, day care, utility bills and more.
Pros of Using QuickBooks for Personal Finance Tracking
The benefit of using QuickBooks for your personal finances is that you can see a birdseye view of your finances in one place. It doesn’t matter if you are at home or on the go, QuickBooks has you covered.
Once you set up regular expense accounts, it is easy to group and categorize transactions or track income. Make regular payments to a cleaner or gardener? You can track all of that too!
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Cons
The biggest drawback to using QuickBooks to track your personal finances is the cost. It is small enough that it shouldn’t hurt the wallet.
If you can afford Netflix or Spotify then you can afford QuickBooks to track your monthly finances. Plus you could argue that tracking your personal finances provides more benefits than any of those entertainment services.
Pricing
Just how expensive is QuickBooks? The basic plans start at around $8 a month and it goes up from there. That isn’t much more than a Starbucks coffee or two in a month or like we mentioned, less than a Netflix subscription.
For a total year, you can expect around $100 or a little bit over. Is it worth it to track your finances? Most likely if you are trying to be more on top of your spending and budgeting. However, there is a cheaper option. Let’s look at how you can use excel as an alternative.
Using Excel for Personal Finances (An Alternative Solution)
A cheaper option in the longer term for staying on top of your personal finances is Excel. You can make a one-time payment and never have to worry about reoccurring payments again.
Similar to excel you could even use Google docs if you want a completely free option but Excel has a bit more reporting capability.
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Pros of Using Excel for Personal Finance
Once you get familiar with excel (maybe you already are) you’ll realize you can harness a bunch more capabilities and the reporting are endless in excel. Custom dashboards can be made with ease to track personal finances, budgets, stay on top of investments and more.
Another reason Excel is so good for personal finances is because it doesn’t change much. The software has been around for years and is very stable. Almost any computer can run excel and if you put your spreadsheets on the cloud then you can access your personal finances anywhere.
Cons
The drawbacks of using Excel for personal finance and not software like QuickBooks are mainly two things. The learning curve and remote access. The learning curve isn’t such a big deal with excel because it’s not too complex to manage personal finances in excel.
Plus, there is a learning curve to QuickBooks as well.
The second con is remote access. QuickBooks has a better mobile app. Luckily the solution is easy and if you store your spreadsheet on Google drive then you can access it anywhere on your phone.
Pricing
Aside from a one-time purchase or purchase of some templates, excel is cheaper over the long run. You don’t have to pay the ongoing costs as you do with QuickBooks.
At $149 for a one-time purchase of Microsoft office, it will take you over a year to break even with excel, just to be compared with QuickBooks. Make sure you are set on tracking your personal finances through your own personal accounting before making the jump.
Should You Do Your Own Personal Accounting?
It is actually super easy to do your own personal accounting. That is, tracking your income and expenses. Some people call it budgeting but it is basically personal accounting.
Everyone should take it upon themselves to do their own personal accounting. It’s not something you need to outsource and it isn’t that time-consuming. You are looking at an hour at most a month to know the position of all your finances.
With personal accounting, you can hit your personal finance goals and put your financial position in a better place.
Can You Use QuickBooks for Personal Finance: Final Thoughts
QuickBooks is a fantastic software to use for personal finances and accounting but just keep in mind it isn’t the only option out there. It’s worth giving QuickBooks a try for a few months, see if you like it, keeping in mind that you can always fall back and use excel if you need to.
