Tips for Using QuickBooks To Manage Personal Finances
Without question, QuickBooks is one of the best tools for managing your company finances. Companies of all sizes use this business accounting software because of its simplicity, ease of use, and affordability. However, as a business owner, you might not have yet considered using QuickBooks as a tool for managing your own personal finances.
In this post, we share a couple of useful tips and trips that will give you inspiration and guidance about the best way to use QuickBooks for managing your personal money matters.
How Does QuickBooks Work for Personal Finances?
Before we review how QuickBooks is suitable for personal finances, here’s a quick overview of some of the features of the product that can be easily adapted for personal use or managing the finances of your home.
- Online Bill Payments
- Generate Customizable Reports
- Financial Planning
- Tracking your Expenses
- Budgeting
- Automations for Savings and Payments
- Management of Income and Taxes
Is QuickBooks good for personal finances?
Yes. As you can see from the list of features we have outlined above, there are many ways you can use QuickBooks to manage your family’s finances.
Tips for Using QuickBooks for Your Personal Finance
Using QuickBooks for your personal money management is a sound idea.
You can easily track any expenses and income from a range of useful sources.
Here are just a few ideas for some of the different ways you can use QuickBooks for personal money management.
Yes. As you can see from the list of features we have outlined above, there are many ways you can use QuickBooks to manage your family’s finances.
Save Time by Automating Your Bills
Most people are savvy enough to have their bill payments set-up on autopayment.
For some, this also extends to their savings and income too. For those people who have credit card reward schemes in place, making a payment via this source can return more rewards and financial benefits compared to paying out of a checking account each time.
You can quickly and easily enter any bills as they are received into the QuickBooks platform using a feature called ‘memorized transactions.’ This way, you will only ever need to alter the payable amount and add a date to the transaction.
This means the transaction will then be posted to the correct account, be that your bank account or your credit card.
Maximize your Savings
One of the most effective savings tools is the automation of saving deposits.
Perhaps you would like to set-up automatic transfers to go from your checking account into your savings account on a regular basis.
QuickBooks is a great tool to help you manage your cash flow closely, giving you the freedom to flex the amounts you pay into your savings each month, based on any excess that is left in your budget once all of your bills have been paid.
Manage your Cash flow Closely
Perhaps one of the best benefits of using QuickBooks for your personal finances is the ability it gives you to stay in control of your cash flow.
You will need to input your financial information from your accounts regularly (or you can integrate them with one of the open-banking APIs if this is available for your specific bank).
You can enter past transactions as well as future transactions, which means you can also forecast your future months spending more easily if you know payments are due to made soon.
For any transactions that occur on a regular basis, such as loan or mortgage payments, and which the amounts rarely change, this is a set-it and forget-it task. You can easily use the ‘memorize transactions’ function in QuickBooks for these.
Using the memorized transaction function is easy to do. If you want to use QuickBooks for personal financial management, learning how to use this will save you so much time and effort.
Regular Reconciliations
Reconciliation is another important cash-flow management task.
It is something you should try to do each week or at least once every two weeks.
The easiest way to look at this is that you are balancing the books on your personal finances. Using the reconciliation in QuickBooks features gives you greater control over your spending, and by regularly clearing your transactions through the bank regularly, you can quickly and easily spot and account for any discrepancies.
The combination of these four points alone allows you to closely and carefully manage your cash flow, stay in control of your bill payments and maximize your saving potential.
Personal Financial Reporting with QuickBooks
One of the other useful tips for QuickBooks to help you manage your personal finances is the reporting tools you have access to.
As an important note, you must ensure you reconcile your QuickBooks account first to make sure you are using QuickBooks in the most accurate way.
This doesn’t just apply to your bank account, and it must include your loans or credit card accounts too.
Essentially, you need to reconcile any account that has a statement with a beginning and ending balance, and a start and end date.
A simple profit and loss report is an easy way to get started, and you can view this report in a number of ways. Some people like to compare the report to previous periods, and making a comparison against the previous month is also very straightforward.
If you run monthly and annual comparisons, it will make it very easy to see any areas for concern in a snapshot view.
Using QuickBooks for these five purposes alone will bring you closer to your money, and this alone can tend to increase your ability to manage your personal finances more effectively.
How to Perform a Reconciliation with Quickbooks
- Double-click on any credit card or bank account to open-up the register of that account.
- Next, on the right-hand side of the register that is in-between the deposit and payment columns, there is a box with a tick inside of it. This mark indicates whether or not a transaction has cleared.
- You can then access your bank or credit accounts to show the ending balance for each day, week, or bi-weekly period.
- The final step in the process is to change the display options within your bank register. So, when you double-click on your QuickBooks account and open up the register, you will be able to see a box that is located in the lower left-side that is labeled ‘sort-by.’ If you sort this by cleared status, it will sort the items in order of the cleared items first.
This gives you the ability to enter any transactions as they appear on either your bank or credit card transactions.
Is Quicken or QuickBooks better for personal finances?
In almost all scenarios, QuickBooks is better than Quicken. If you already use QuickBooks for your business, there is the added benefit of not needing to learn how this software works. Better still, you will have already paid for the product, and no further financial outlay is going to be needed.
One of the biggest reasons people state that QuickBooks is a better product for them is because of the intuitive design of the product, which makes it so easy to use. For any intricate requirements, QuickBooks has a huge online knowledge base of easy to follow articles to guide you through the process you need assistance with.
What is the Best Way to Use QuickBooks for Personal Finances?
If you have never used QuickBooks before and need a little help getting started, it has become so popular for managing your at-home finances, that there are even QuickBooks courses online to help you learn everything you need to know about using it to manage your personal finances.
The set-up wizard will guide you through the process of connecting your personal accounts, and adding ‘vendors,’ which are essentially payees or payers, is another straightforward process.
In Summary
For anybody who uses Quickbooks for business, adapting this for your personal finances is quick and easy to do. Its range of features and easy-to-use interface makes it the ideal solution to use to keep track of your finances, pay bills, see patterns and spot any areas for concern quickly through a range of reports that can be set-up in no time at all.
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