When you have multiple credit cards, loans, checking/savings and investment accounts, retirement savings accounts, and bills to keep track of, managing your personal finances without missing deadlines or losing track of transactions can be enormously difficult on your own.
Fortunately, there are plenty of hands-off money management strategies, mobile apps, and personal finance software programs available to help consumers more effectively track their spending and saving patterns and maintain their financial well-being. However, few apps and finance software programs can compare to the latest fintech wunderkind: CountAbout, a customizable, easy-to-use, and secure personal finance software.
Unlike many personal financial management software programs, CountAbout simply requires an Internet connection (rather than taking up valuable space on your laptop or desktop computers’ hard drives as a downloadable program). Its website points out that it’s the only personal finance software that imports data from Quicken and Mint, which makes it so much easier to manage your money from virtually anywhere and develop better financial habits along the way.
If you’ve been searching for the best financial software programs, then CountAbout might be just what you’re looking for. Here’s what you need to know before deciding whether it’s right for you.
Best Personal Finance Tracking Software
CountAbout is useful precisely because of the comprehensive nature of its cloud-based software program. It not only imports your data from external resources like Quicken and Mint, but it also syncs with your financial institutions (banks, credit unions, investment firms) and automatically downloads your transactions so you never have to wonder where your money currently is (or is going).
CountAbout also offers fully customized budgeting options (income and spending categories, tags), the ability to upload receipts and invoices as attachments, and recurring transaction notices to help you keep track of every detail, due date, and payment deadlines.
If you’re an entrepreneur, freelancer or small business owner, then CountAbout also has you covered with nifty features like invoicing, financial reports, and budgetary analyses. If you’re making multiple transactions per day or dealing with an irregular income, then CountAbout will help you oversee your running balances and pending transactions to avoid overdraft fees.
Manage Money Online
CountAbout is available for desktop computers, smartphones (iOS and Android) and tablet devices. Since it’s cloud-based software, you don’t need to worry about losing your data in the unfortunate event that your computer crashes or your phone gets stolen – your information will still be accessible through its highly secure, encrypted program when you log-in through another device.
Keeping your financial information stored with CountAbout is no different from any other online banking experience because they use the same levels of privacy protections as other financial institutions do. CountAbout also uses something called a data aggregator to ensure your login information for the banks/credit unions you sync with your CountAbout account are never accessible or viewable to anyone else (not even CountAbout!).
What Does CountAbout Cost?
CountAbout is not supported by advertisers (like some other personal finance and online budgetary programs are), so they charge a nominal fee of $9.99 per year for the Basic subscription or $39.99 per year for the Premium subscription. The Basic CountAbout subscription (which effectively costs less than $1/month) does not offer automatic transaction downloads (for banks, credit cards, and other financial institutions), but you still have the option to manually add these transactions to your budget.
The CountAbout Premium subscription (which costs a little over $3/month, billed annually) offers the automatic transaction downloads feature, which can greatly simplify your financial management with minimal effort on your part. CountAbout offers a 15-day free trial of the Premium subscription to help you “try before you buy.”
Other paid features include invoice/receipt image attachments ($10/year extra) and small business invoice creating/sending/tracking ($60/year extra).
Is CountAbout Worth It?
If you’ve always wanted to take more of a hands-off approach to financial management in order to free up more time for working on things you genuinely enjoy, then CountAbout might be just what you need to expedite the less exciting aspects of adulting. Even the Premium subscription with all of the bells and whistles costs less than $4/month (less than the price of a venti specialty coffee) – is that worth the convenience and peace of mind you get from knowing your personal finances are optimally managed in a highly secure, cloud-based software program?
With more and more aspects of our lives becoming more efficient through advanced technologies and automation, why not add personal financial management to the list of tasks you were able to streamline with the help of algorithms? You’ll still need to be mindful of your own spending and saving habits of course, but there’s no reason why you should resign yourself to manually managing your finances when there are much faster (and affordable) options like CountAbout out there.
