The US has mint.com, Yodlee MoneyCenter, Quicken Online and Wesabe. But don’t despair — South Africa also has some free personal finance tools you can use to help you manage your money online.
Softline Pastel introduced InCheck in January this year and it has a total of 4 483 users, with a current sign-up rate of 25 new users per week. It simplifies your money management and allows you to monitor all your accounts centrally, access historical information and generally take control of your finances. It also offers tracking and analysis tools.
“Users can set up the accounts they want to track and capture transactions into the system. For immediate tracking and analysis, historic transactions can be imported into InCheck directly from online banking,” says Steven Cohen, managing director of Softline Pastel.
InCheck eschews technical and banking jargon and its simple graphs provide an uncomplicated way to see an organised breakdown of monthly activity, as well as tracking over time. Because you’re working online, you don’t have to worry about software installation, ongoing maintenance, back-ups or upgrades.
Online security is a concern we all have — Softline Pastel has taken pains to point out that InCheck is secure, using the latest security technologies, including SSL security, firewalls, defensive programming and encrypted data. Customers’ information is obviously highly confidential.
Managing your small business online
The company has also launched an online tool aimed at the SME market — Pastel My Business Online. To date, this new tool has 3 411 users. It has been designed specifically for business owners who have started out with perhaps not as much bookkeeping knowledge as they would like. The tool is a multi-user system with dashboards, graphs and drill-downs to source transactions, and will soon be integrated with BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms. It is already supported on iPhone — Apple statistics show that 1 165 downloads have been done via the app store.
The main advantage is its portability. “Users can view customers’ sales histories and contact details and write notes while on the road, or in front of a client,” says Cohen. You can also check accounts without having to travel to a customer’s premises, as accountants can log on to the system.
Joanne van der Walt, marketing manager at Pastel accounting, says regular customer surveys allow customers to comment on what is effective and what they would like to see introduced. Their comments and queries are recorded and this week the company held its first user webiner (web seminar).
Softline Pastel promises to tweak its current systems to keep up with new technologies and user platforms.
Visit InCheck: www.pastelincheck.co.za
Visit MyBusiness here: www.pastelmybusiness.co.za
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