If you're willing to invest the time, a personal-finance software program can bring your money management to a whole new level, but you don't need to do more than the basics if you don't have the time or interest. Unless you have very few expenses and they're relatively simple, a good software program will make the job of tracking everything easier and less time-consuming. Being able to print out graphs and reports from your PC with the click of a button can serve as a motivation for entering all that data. If you don't want to use a computer, that's okay too. It's entirely possible to budget successfully with paper and pencil.

How Can Software Make Budgeting Easier?

With personal-finance software, you can balance your checkbook, pay bills, create budgets, and do a basic comparison of budget versus actual expenses by category. You can also enter more detailed information such as investments, assets, liabilities, and so on, and print personal financial statements showing your net income and net worth.

Start out with the simplest steps. Detailed tracking of investments with personal-finance software can be time-consuming and complex — not for the faint of heart. You can get the same results in your reports by setting up an account in the software for each investment and changing the balances each month to reflect the balance on the statement you receive from your brokerage, bank, or mutual fund.

Shop Around

Some of the most popular personal-finance software programs for automating your checkbook and tracking your expenses are Quicken, Microsoft Money, and Moneydance. These are available for purchase online or at big office supply stores such as Staples.

Microsoft Money and Quicken are both user-friendly programs with many features you'll probably never use, but they're also great programs for the average person who just wants to do online banking, automatically reconcile their bank statement, track expenses, budget, prepare for tax time, and print reports. The budget versus actual report alone is worth the investment. Moneydance is a simpler program that is not as well known, but it provides the same basic features without all the fancy bells and whistles.