There are plenty of budgeting tools that are free to use, come with easy to understand instructions, and help users manage their personal finances. Whether you wish to download one on your phone, laptop, or personal computer, you will find a plethora of beneficial features to set a budget and track your spending.
Budgeting apps offer handy features that help you to compare your spending on a monthly basis by allowing you to track and categorize expenses. Some expenses are easy to predict and factor in like student loans, mortgage payments, and utility bills. Others are more difficult to predict as they vary, and discretionary spending falls in this category. Budgeting software helps you to get a good idea of your spending by showing how your income looks against your spending. What you have to do is enter your expenses, including groceries, bills, rent, and car insurance as well as your bank and investment accounts. Then you can switch between your expenses and income categories and view your transactions, income, and deposits. You can also monitor transactions across accounts and adjust a time period in order to get an idea which sources of income and expenses make what percentage. You can compare your spending and income on a monthly basis with the help of a handy bar-graph. Looking at your transactions will help you to set a realistic budget to stick to.
There are software tools that allow you to set budget goals, track expenses, and view your credit score. They come with a budget goal tracker that helps users to plan ahead and get an idea of how much they will save if they cut expenses across different categories. You can also set goals such as buying real estate. To find out how much you can afford, you need to fill in details such as annual property tax and insurance, down payment percentage, mortgage rate, and annual income. The software also helps you to create a realistic and balanced budget by entering bills by category and monitoring your spending over time. You can view your spending by category, including financial, bills and utilities, auto and transport, gas and fuel, shopping, and uncategorized. In addition to renaming categories, you are free to enter details such as date, merchant, notes, and tags. You can also access your investments, loan and account balances, and bank accounts.
Some budgeting tools also allow you to create reports on your expenses, income, and net worth by time period, including current year, last quarter, last month, and past week. If you choose to create a report on your expenses, the software will display a pie chart with transactions such as rent, groceries, auto, and miscellaneous. The tool also allows you to create budget categories and allocate amounts that you plan to spend so that you can see whether you spend too much. Free budgeting tools come with other handy features such as the option to view your finances in different currencies. There are also tools to access your investment portfolio and transactions to track performance of investments such as employee stock purchase plans and stocks. You can track your retirement, investment, and loan accounts and monitor retirement and liquid holdings such as mutual funds, ETFs, bonds, and options. You will see a pie-graph by holding and security, including total value and percentages. There is also a handy option to track value over different time periods.
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Open-source software is basically a type of software for which the source code is publicly and freely available and is published under a license, whether copyleft or permissive.
Some prominent examples that many people have heard of are OpenOffice, MySQL, Zimbra, and Alfresco, to name a few. OpenOffice is a type of a productivity suite that includes features such as a database management application, drawing and presentation applications, a spreadsheet, and a word processor. It is the brainchild of OpenOffice.org. Firefox is a competitor of Internet Explorer and other browsers and was released by the Mozilla Foundation in 2002. It is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. Similar to EnterpriseDB and Ingres, MySQL is a database package and a management system developed by the Oracle Corporation in 1995. A variety of web applications use MySQL, examples being WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. It is also used by major social media outlets and websites such as Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook. Zimbra is advertised as an alternative to Outlook Server and open-source email software. Zimbra Collection was released by Synacor in 2005. The suite features server and client components and options such as videoconferencing, chat, and document sharing.
Alfresco is also open-source software and an alternative to Documentum and Microsoft Sharepoint. It is a type of collaboration and data management application developed by Alfresco Software Inc. The software comes with a number of handy features such as federated servers, integrated publishing, and learning content management support. Used to manage rich media, videos, images, records, web, and documents, it also features capabilities such as clustering support, online and desktop integration, portable application packaging, and multi-platform and multi-language support. Other examples of open-source software are Asterix, SugarCRM, Marketcetera, and Gimp.
Open-source software is available across multiple categories such as file transfer, file manager, database management, and data compression. The list of categories also includes application servers, 3D and 2D graphics software, search engines, and instant messengers.
Groupings and projects that are worth mentioning include the GNU Project, Free Software Foundation, and Apache Software Foundation. The latter has a number of active projects such as a data serialization system, big data management system, and batch and stream processing engine. At present, Apache is involved in more than 350 open-source initiatives, including 46 incubating podlings, 5 special committees, and 198 project management committees. The projects use programming languages such as Ruby, Pearl, Scala, JavaScript, C++, Python, and Java. The GNU Project is about developing a software system that is free to use and is compatible with Unix. All components were developed by 1990, including games, libraries, graphical interfaces, mail software, text formatters, editors, and compilers, the only exception being kernel. Linus Torvalds released a Linux kernel the following year, which was integrated into the operating system. Professionals involved with the GNU Project also work on developing games and software products across multiple categories. Software products fall in categories such as reading, printing, localization, text creation, security, and many others. Software for businesses is also developed and made available, including project management, telephony, barcoding, productivity, etc. When it comes to games, there are plenty of options in categories such as adventure, role playing, strategy, board game, and simulation.