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Financial apps are designed to help you monitor and track your assets while you stay updated with current events that affect your investment decisions. Just like a business, the bigger it gets, the better you have to be at managing it. Stress, anxiety, and pressure are by-products of growing wealth. Principals need the right combination of people and technology to stay in control. For starters, a holistic view of one’s total net worth is imperative for managing complexities. While a majority of us use financial apps to fill this gap, most personal financial apps today offer only a subset of features required to support the comprehensive needs of savvy investors.
An individual’s net worth is calculated via arduous consolidation of data on liquid and illiquid assets from scattered spreadsheets and heaps of paperwork. The need of the hour is for a financial app with a simple interface that collates every bit of information and provides a quick view of the bottom line across all assets. With that in mind, here are five features you should look for while evaluating whether your personal finance app makes the cut.
Valuation balance sheet
With financial data scattered across spreadsheets, wealth owners end up unaware of their actual asset allocation and portfolio performance. As a result, individuals struggle to access important data at critical times of decision-making. This is where balance sheets come into play. A simple investment-oriented balance sheet puts the power of information back into the hands of the wealth owner by providing an overview of your net worth at any time across all assets, liabilities, and annualized returns.
Cash flow statement
A personal cash flow statement keeps track of your investments by mapping how much cash is moving in (inflows) and moving out (outflows) of your investments and accounts. This determines your net cash flow and also enables you to look at future cash flows for planning investments. A good personal finance app should map this efficiently and notify you when you exceed the limits of asset allocation, cash inflow, and outflow. The next time you think of selling your car, you can open your app to quickly track how much you’ve invested in the vehicle and can accordingly determine the selling price.
Monitor your income and expense
Even if you’re great at creating wealth, you must be smart at monitoring and managing expenses. More often than not, we find ourselves making frivolous expenses that in hindsight could’ve been easily avoided. A good personal finance app should help set your monthly budget and let you monitor your income and expenditure by auto-syncing your bank account and credit cards.
Document vault
Our lives are inundated with documents and paperwork, irrespective of wealth. You may have a great filing system or have switched to cloud storage platforms like Dropbox or Google Drive. But over time, searching for documents can be nerve-wracking due to poor or no file tagging structures in place. Therefore, we need apps that can link all assets and transactions to uploaded documents like contract notes, insurance, property purchases, etc. This eliminates the need to label every document, giving you peace of mind.
Investment news
Almost every business newspaper and magazine in the world has an app today. Since it is essential to be constantly up-to-date on the latest news related to stock markets, mutual funds, real estate, and so on, users download various news apps. Alas, investment news is only provided on these news apps and not on personal finance apps. Thus, it is important to bring together news on all assets and liabilities from an external medium onto your personal finance app so that you don’t have to hunt for relevant news whenever you need it.
Experience a seamlessly integrated financial life with Asset Vantage.
Our fully configurable family office software platform provides comprehensive portfolio reporting, an integrated general ledger for accounting, reconciliation, and data aggregation, and an analytics platform that encompasses all asset classes, currencies, advisors, and geographies.
More than 300 of the world’s wealthiest families, representing combined assets of over $125 billion in value, use our platform. We serve them through single-family offices, multi-family offices, CPA firms, and directly. AV has the distinction of being the only platform that’s truly global, serving users across the Americas, UK, Middle East, and Asia.
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