5 Tips And Tricks to Effectively Manage Your Finances

When it comes to money, it’s a tricky subject to handle. One of the hardest things to do in this modern day and age is to keep track of everything that is going out and coming in. Now, we could be talking about a massive company, a small business or even just keeping track of all the bills and your own household finances. Keeping track of these and managing these is one of the more stressful things about a company or home life. However, if you manage to keep track of all these, work out a system that works for you, it can become something that just becomes second nature to manage. This is what we are going to try and help you achieve with these 5 tips and tricks. So, let’s just jump straight into it with our 6 tips and tricks to effectively manage your cash flow.

Get An App

One of the best ways to be able to manage your finances is to download applications for your phone or tablet that allows you to easily check, update and process the information that is either coming in or going out. We’d recommend Mint.com for iOS and Android as a great option as it has a beautiful looking interface along with great support for many different bank accounts and even a desktop site to track everything when you’re on a computer too.

Using an application allows you to instantly react to financial changes, noting them down, checking they’re correct, sending them or whatever it is you need to do. Therefore, we’d highly recommend this sort of service if you don’t find yourself able to spend a lot of time in one place to sort your finances.

Keep It An Excel Document

Excel Documents, over the past few years, have almost become the one stop shop for creating finance records. They offer up an unbeatable way to view and edit many numbers at the same time. Add in the full range of different functions you can use and you’ll have a financial record of everything you’ve spent, allowing you to keep track of it all, how much money you should have, how much you don’t have etc. If you’re someone that struggles to see where everything is coming or going, this is a great way. Highlight expenses in red to show they’re coming out and highlight green as income to show it’s coming in.

Highlight expenses in red to show they’re coming out and highlight green as income to show it’s coming in. Then have a total bar along the top that remains in place that takes all these actions into account, red means to take that number away from the total and green means to add that number to the total. Not only is this visually easier, but it also takes away the hassle of having to add and minus everything.

Set Yourself A Day and Time To Go Over It

If you’re someone that just seems to have a lot of little financial changes happening over the day, then maybe the best thing to do is set yourself a time of the day or even a day of the week when you’re going to sit down and g through all your expenditures, receipts and anything that should be coming in and work it all out that way. This way, there’s always a set time when you know you’ll have your finances sorted.

Take Action As It Comes In

We mentioned this one earlier when talking about potentially using an application to track your finances. But making sure you do something about it when you get notified of a change in financial situation is oh so very important. To forget to pay something or to forget someone owes you something can obviously result in a loss of money which is always an awful situation. We’d recommend getting an app like ToDoist or Evernote to help you organise your finances on the go.

With ToDoist, every time you get a notification or get some sort of reminder to pay or be paid, you can add it to your To-Do list so when you come around to a situation when you can actually sort it, it’s there for you. Evernote is a note-taking application that would work in the same way. You can set up separate Notebooks – potentially for different clients or forms of income – and then add notes into these Notebooks every time you need to.

Pre-Plan As Far As You Can Until You Feel Comfortable

One of the best ways to manage your financial situation is to plan as far ahead as you can. If you’re the financial head of the family, maybe you work out what your income is, minus bills and food and then whatever is left is money you can spend on more enjoyable things. If you work for a business, you work out every expense you know of coming out this month and then what you can put towards either new equipment, new staff or new projects. We’d recommending trying to plan up to a month ahead, this gives you plenty of relaxation time where you can then not have to worry about it.

Obviously you have to account for the fact that things may change in that you have to spend on something unexpected or you receive a payment for something you weren’t expecting either. However, with the aforementioned tips and tricks, you should easily be able to adapt your finance record to accompany this.