Keeping the track of your budget is never an easy thing. Sure, you may be aware of the major expenses you are expected to make, but you would be surprised to just how much those smaller account payables can amount over the course of time. For an individual, one solution would be to mark down every single dollar they spend, but for a company, this is a bit trickier, seeing how more than one person may have the access to company funds.
With this in mind, here are five best ways to track corporate finances online in real-time.
Budgeting Tools let money work for you
1. Excel
For the top of our list, we need to take a look at something simple and familiar. We are, or course, talking about MS Excel. By making a budget template on your own or downloading one for free, you get a simple and frugal way of updating your current financial standings.
The greatest downside of this particular method is that it requires an incredible amount of corporate discipline. You see, due to the fact that none of this is automated, it will be a duty of individuals who have company funds at their disposal to regularly update their current spendings. This is why, such a method is mostly recommended to startups and SMBs, which have a more centralized budget.
2. BudgetTracker
Another great software for tracking your budget manually is BudgetTracker. Like Excel, this software requires you to manually insert your incomes and outcome, but it does make your life easier by helping you get a detailed tracking of spending and budgeting.
Unfortunately, at the moment, there is no way of linking data from your accounts in order to automate at least one part of the process. Still, according to experts behind a renewed corporate insolvency firm this has an upside as well.
Seeing how it constantly requires your intervention, this particular software requires you to invest more interest into your company’s finances. Needless to say, this can save you from a world of trouble in the future.
Budgeting Tools you can’t live without
3. TheExpenseTracker
This particular software has the thing that previous two entries on this list desperately lacked – the full automation of your budget tracking process. What this incredible tool does is it connects with your cards, phone and email. This way, any purchase that comes through some of these channels gets automatically updated.
You get a tool for real-time tracking of all your company’s expenses, which, frankly, gives you a much better picture of what you’re up against. Unfortunately, the cost of this app is $19.95 per month, which is a bit more than some of its counterparts are charging. Still, people who went on and tested the tool claim that it is worth the money.
4. The Birdy
Finally, we come to the tool that gives you a full digitalization of all your expenses, even those made through email or twitter. The basic version is free, but for a figure as low as $4.95 you can get all the advanced features required to automatically track your financial footprint in the digital environment.
Unfortunately, this kind of monitoring is something a lot of people are not comfortable with, seeing how they fear that such a trend would compromise their privacy.
5. Personal Capital
Those who are mostly interested in tracking multiple investments, can always try personal capital. The best part of using this software is that it does more than simply tracking your investment portfolio. Based on your previous predisposition and success rate, this software gives you an objective advice on your future investments.
Still, while their regular service is completely free of charge, this feature is premium. Luckily, you are required to pay no more than a low 1 percent fee, which can give you a great ROI.
Conclusion
As you can see, this list offers something for everyone. Those who put frugality above everything else (which is understandable, seeing how it’s your company’s finances we are talking about) can do all of this in Excel. On the other hand, some people are of the attitude that time is money. For them, saving time on making these entries and avoiding the risk of missing something, are more than worth a moderate fee.
Overall, it would be absurd to claim one tool to be clearly superior to others. Remember, there is no such thing as a perfect method; only a perfect method for your company.
