Metrics of Finance

Using metrics to track and optimize your personal and business finances is becoming essential in this age of mobile payments, credit cards, and online banking. As money becomes more and more intangible, it’s easy for companies and people that don’t pay close attention to it to falter and lose track.

Many applications and tools are designed to help you study the metrics of your money, many with social features to hold you accountable. Whether you need to collect data for personal or business use, there is something out there for you.

Mint.com by Intuit is possibly the best known of these monetary tools that have a strong metrics layer. Offering goals and reporting through visualizations, you can use Mint.com to figure out where your money is going. After you know the details, you can change your habits, create a budget, optimize spending across categories, and get more bang for your buck. You can also export data to correlate to other metrics you may be tracking in your spreadsheets.

MoneyBook is an iPhone-based money app that helps you track your money metrics on the go (see Figure 20-8). A key feature to note here (and one to look for in other apps) is the export to .csv function that allows you to send this data to spreadsheets so that you can get the full value of your data. This function is useful for taking a look at not only your money, but your expenses and other on-the-go information.

There are apps for all phone types and all computer types, all of which give you a deeper understanding of the data surrounding your business and personal spending. Heck, there is even one that includes the often-overlooked Linux users: GnuCash! The data you glean from whatever app or program you choose will help you make better financial decisions and set and exceed your financial goals sooner.

This section isn’t really intended to turn into a “best tools” recommendation session. I simply wanted to point you in the direction of a few examples of monetary tools that track the metrics of your money to get you started thinking of your finances as something you can measure, analyze, and improve. You can easily find more tools with a simple search using your favorite search engine.