Budget season is upon us whether we work in/own a company or are an individual. Over the course of my career, I've had my fair share of budgets to work up. And one thing I've learned along the way is the sooner you get your budget in place for the upcoming year and beyond the better you're off.
I'm not here to tout all the benefits of Quicken/QuickBooks just because I'm a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor, as an objective point of view is what I strive for. So...I decided to do a little research and stumbled upon this great budgeting tool at mint.com. Just as I was getting really familiar with it, yesterday's news that Intuit (makers of Quicken and QuickBooks) is acquring Mint really made me laugh. Funny how things work out. Now with Microsoft's Money and Mint out of the picture, Quicken is more than garnering a major share of the personal budgeting market.
There are those of us who don't want to pay anything to better understand our finances, and to those individuals I point you in the direction of the many Excel spreadsheets available through a Google search. A simple pad and pencil will go a long way as well in the beginning phases of the budgeting process. First and foremost, however, you must have an understanding of how much you're spending and what you're spending your money on. Once you know this, you can develop a plan. What a budget is is a plan---your plan.
You may not be interested in all the bells and whistles that Quicken or QuickBooks offers, but I did come across one feature missing in Mint that I don't think I could live without. It was difficult to manipulate its category structure for expenses, and those that I inadvertently subcategorized into incorrect categories could not be changed later. This feature alone persuaded me that Quicken may be monopolizing the market for good reason.
Having said that though, an excellent feature of Mint vs. Quicken Online (both are free to use by the way) is its ability to split transactions into two or more expense categories. Both offer free SMS and email alerts for budget overspending and bank account balances but Quicken Online has not figured out how to allow the splitting of multiple expense categories, which obviously skews the numbers. (The desktop versions of Quicken all have the split transaction feature enabled.)
Whatever way you decide to head in doesn't matter. It's the process itself that is critical to get started. If we don't know how much we're spending in certain categories, we cannot make informed choices/changes going ahead. Without a budget, we cannot plan for our future.
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