Can you use quickbooks for personal finances

When you are ready to start your personal finance accounting, fire up Quickbooks on your personal computer. The process of using the software for your personal accounting needs is pretty much the same as business accounting, only with a few minor differences.

Once Quickbooks has loaded, use the built-in setup Wizard to walk you through the rest of the steps. If you have a checking account, savings account or any other bank account, you use the setup Wizard to connect this information to your Quickbooks.

Either way is perfectly acceptable, but using the setup wizard will save you both time and energy. For instance, your rent, electric bill, cable bill, car payment and even groceries can be labeled as a vendor.

The key thing to remember is that each transaction needs to have a specific vendor associated with it. Quickbooks offers a number of helpful features to make business accounting quick and easy. Are there some months better than others?

Did you have a better year last year? The beauty of QuickBooks Online is it provides you both monthly and yearly data reports. You get a crystal clear portrait of your finances over a specific period of time. The trick now is to look for areas of improvement within your data.

A trend is simply a movement that could be predictable. That might seem silly, but in the context of a business, this can truly make or break a bottom line. Perhaps you spend more in the summer dining out than you do in the winter.

Numbers are facts; all we need to do is interpret them. Why not run a report by vendor looking at your activity for the year? Honestly, this is one of my favorite reports in QBO. 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.

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. 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. 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. Whether you choose to do a daily, weekly or bi-weekly reconciliation, the process is the same. I tend to automate my bills, income and savings as much as possible.

I put all bills on auto payment to hit either a credit card or checking account. I always select credit card when it is an option to not only control cash flow but also to take advantage of credit card rewards. I never carry a balance on my credit card and pay the entire balance off each month when due. When bills roll in I simply enter the bill into QuickBooks through memorized transactions.

That way I only need to change the amount and date then the transaction will automatically post to the correct credit card or bank account.

As far as income I always sign up for direct deposit. I again used memorized transactions to have my paycheck automatically post to the correct accounts. The last thing to consider is automating your savings. Maybe you want to set up an automatic transfer from checking to savings each month. However, you certainly want it to be an amount that you can easily afford each month. The combination of automating your bills and income along with daily reconciliations is really powerful for your family finances.

You will become more involved with your finances so you are paying closer attention and caring more. How can you automate your bills and income in QuickBooks? The last way I use QuickBooks for personal finances is through financial reporting.