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Tips and tricks: Managing finances
One of the most difficult tasks is to manage one’s finances. Keeping track of where all the money disappeared to is even more difficult. This is where the Ace Money Lite — a free personal and small business finance management tool — comes to the rescue.
The program provides all the features of a professional monetary application. Once the program is installed from
Select ‘Pakistani Rupee (PKR)’ as default currency along with the number and date formats. The program then asks you whether you want to load the sample file. Since we are just starting off, it is a good idea to load it. The home screen is displayed with the title “Accounts”.
Just below the menu bar, an IE style toolbar is present. Remember to press Home any time you are in some other window and want to revert to the starting point.
Setting up the parameters
Let us first explore a few basic options. The View menu keeps track of all the major entities involved in recording and reporting on financial transactions. The first item is Accounts. Next is Banks where you can keep contact, web and other info regarding local banks. Move on to Payees. These are the people or concerns whom you pay or through whom you earn something. You can store detailed information on all the concerns you have financial transactions with here.
Next item under View is Categories. How well categories are defined governs how much functionality can be extracted out of Ace Money Lite. Take a cue from pre-defined categories like leisure, insurance, healthcare and various types of bills and taxes.
Double click a category. Here, a subname can be defined which works as category grouping. For example, you can create more than one categories with the same name with different subnames, like ‘cellphone’ and ‘natural gas’.
The next option is to select the type of category, which can be either ‘Expense’ or ‘Income’. Budget limit and period can be defined optionally which tracks your spending habits across several categories so you know exactly where you are spending and how much.
Continuing on the View menu, click Schedule. Here the reoccurring transactions can be set. It is very useful to schedule fixed transactions, like rents, maintenance bill and salary as both withdrawal and deposits can be defined.
Standard options like frequency, numbered or continuous nature of transactions, payee and category must be set. Here, Calendar tab gives an instant snapshot of expected credits and debits (shown in red) spread over a month. You can also double click a calendar entry to enter its transaction.
Recording transactions
Select the account in Accounts section. Transaction list is displayed. From the right handside pane, select New Transaction. Transaction screen is displayed. Select a type (withdrawal, deposit or transfer if multiple accounts are defined), date and amount. Next, select a Payee, Category and Sub-category. If a budget value is defined, it is automatically fetched as transaction amount.
Transaction categories defined in Tools>Transition categories also appear in this dropdown. Once the transaction details are added, press OK and the list is updated and a new row is added. With each transaction, running balance is calculated so you know the current balance in your account.
By default, all newly added transactions have an ‘uncleared’ status, meaning they have not been committed in your bank account yet. Once you are sure that the transaction has been made part of your account statement, right-click and mark it as ‘cleared’. At the end of the month, you may mark transactions as ‘reconciled’ matching them with the actual account’s statement.
Viewing reports
In the transaction list, press ‘Current month report’ and the Report view will appear. From the lefthand side pane, uncheck all the ‘Filter by’ options. The first tab displays category-wise breakdown of income and expenses, while second and third tabs display income and expense pie charts respectively category-wise. To view more reports, press Reports button in the toolbar. Here you can access cash flow, transaction, spending and budget reports in both tabular and graphical formats.
The computer has helped automate many of our daily tasks. And with programs like Ace Money, computers are set to play an even more important role in our lives.
nizar.ali@ gmail.com
