Personal & SME Accounting Software & General Finance Tips

#1

Anyone using any form of personal and small business finance software? Looking for something (that works in SA but doesn’t 100% need to be automated) to help manage my and the missus’ personal accounts and maybe use the same software for the business stuff too.

I’ve used Quicken and MS Money in the past but Quicken is heavily US-centric and doesn’t automate SA bank accounts, and Money has been discontinued (and its Money in Excel replacement is still only available in the US).

Anyone using 22Seven, or something similar, on the regular for their personal finance tracking? What are your impressions?

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#2

I’ve used HomeBank at times and found it meets my minimal, single cave dwelling slob requirements just fine. Not sure if it’ll have the features you need, but it does multiple currencies.

http://homebank.free.fr/en/index.php

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#3

I use the old version (the new version is subscription based) of YNABthat I bought on steam during a steam sale - ironically :stuck_out_tongue: To track and plan my budgets, pretty much following the four rules of YNAB.

Heard good things about 22seven on the Fatwallet podcast. The thing that makes me nervous about 22seven is entering my banking details into their website.

From various readings on mybb I’ve seen quickbooks recommended a few times and xero. Quickbooks gives their pricing in Rands and xero in USD. Haven’t used either as I don’t have a business, yet.

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#4

I use 22Seven, and it’s decent. Certainly gave me some KPI’s to keep track of that was a lot of PT previously, helped identify one or two debit orders that I thought had been cancelled but wasn’t, and shows me how little net worth I have.

What I love is that it pulls in all my accounts, even my Easy Equities accounts.

I’ve got no idea how the business part of 22Seven performs.

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#5

This is so fitting! My missus and I used to use a Pastel home accounting with a low sub. The idea was that we use it for a few months then set up a budget. That worked well. The problem was actually sticking to the budget!

Now we need a replacement to try again. Thanks for the tips! And the push :grin:

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#6

For business, if you’re with FNB, I think they’ve got a free package called Instant Accounting or something. They’ve got a bunch of services for small business, but haven’t looked at those things in years.

22Seven works nice for personal tracking. Don’t think it will work for actual accounting, but just to manage spend and things like that. I haven’t used it in a while because I don’t like what I see :slight_smile:

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#7

Haha! I know that feeling, and here I am looking to get validation of my kak financial situation anyway :smiley:

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#8

It could always be worse, besides, you’re not in this alone.

I’ve been using 22seven to some success, not for budgeting but more to track expenditure. It has shown me where and what a lot of my spending goes to as well as the things that you think don’t impact your finances (you know, all those impulse purchases and small things add up).

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#9

One thing I’ve noticed is to avoid Uber Eats and MrD. It works out almost double than quickly driving yourself to go pick up the food. Although, this would probably belong in a “cost saving & money making” thread, rather than accounting software.

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#10

I’ve seen the same. We’ve resorted to not using it anymore due to the high costs.

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#11

It all depends on the specials. We often have 2-for-1 specials on Uber Eats and it’s a real treat. Especially at the curry places around here they often have it.

But yeah, some of the prices are so inflated. Like Burger King! It’s crazy how much more expensive it is on the apps.

Without a decent special or a R75 off voucher or such it really is cheaper to just go buy something.

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#12

No reason why we can’t just double up the info right here.

Everyone is free to drop your tips and tricks and cost saving ideas right here. Saving a couple of bucks here and there is probably something all of us would appreciate.

Set up 22Seven and was welcomed by this fun message:

image
image724×206 37.6 KB

Not that that’s a complete surprise though :joy:

#13

Ok, for saving on expenses, I can say this.

Firstly with takeaways, your biggest savings will be to either fetch yourself or to use the restaurant’s own delivery (if they have). A restaurant might add R40 to the price for delivery, but Uber Eats and MrD adds about 30% markup on all the items on the menu and charges a service fee and delivery fee. All those things adds up.

Secondly, go and investigate your bank’s reward system and see what hoops you need to jump through to get to the highest possible level to maximize rewards. That can generate R1000 or more per month that can pay for dog food or nappies or whatever other essentials, freeing up cash for other things.

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#14

Geez, this message really gives me bad vibes about the future.

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#15

For making money, it will depend on what you have to work with.

If you can get your hands on R100,000 - R200,000 (i.e. available funds from your homeloan), you can easily make R10k-R20k profits per month. If you’ve never done it and don’t know how it works, it sounds scary giving that large amount over to a 3rd party, but the money pretty much stays in your control most of the time, you can check the conditions (arb and fx rates) every day and decide which days you want to trade and a trade is completed basically in 24 hours. If you go this route, I would strongly recommend either Shiftly or Valr. I don’t trust the other companies or their fees are too high.

Due to the high entry point, this obviously isn’t for everybody, but it is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to make money. The reason for the minimum of R100k trading is due to the forex and swift fees. If you trade less than R100k, the fees would eat up all the profits and result in it not being worth it.

For investing smaller amounts monthly, I would recommend (and do myself) invest into multiple streams:

  • Easy Equities - Individual Shares
  • Easy Equities - Index funds, but in a TFSA
  • Crypto

The main trick here is knowing which shares and crypto to buy.

For shares, I would recommend subscribing to Red Hot Penny Shares by FSP (costs about R100 per month). They send out a newsletter every month and in it they provide 1-3 buy recommendations for companies that they’ve investigated and they provide the reason why they are recommending them, the entry price, target price, risk level, fundamentals, etc. He also monitors any news coming from the company and lets you know to sell earlier if things change.
I started investing monthly amounts from 2020 every month, just into the shares tipped by him and my overall portfolio increased by 70% due to profits last year. Almost all the shares tipped is in profit and some even as high as 200% in profit (i.e. AdaptIT, Wescoal, Jubilee Platinum). It is all stocks under R10 (penny shares) with high growth potential and usually within a year.
The whole process of consuming the newsletter and buying the shares (or selling if indicated), takes me maybe 30 minutes per month.

For crypto recommendations, join the Blockchain Whispers telegram group. The guy is quite full of himself and they do have misses, but I’ve tripled my portfolio last year due to some of his tips that came to fruition. It is usually long term holds, but I’ve had gains like 35x on Theta and I’ve just sold Metis this week at 4x which was tipped in September (but apparently I should have sold only a small portion as the main target is 10x). I usually invest a small amount in each tip and even if 4 out of 5 are in loss and one of them make 10x, then I’ve doubled my invested holdings.

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#16

How is that estimate holding up in months like this one where Crypto’s and the US stocks are going red?

#17

Crypto going red isn’t such a big deal. Big sudden movements (up or down) and the R/$ rate is. Usually though, there is some “luck” that when there is rapid crypto movement, the rand happens to weaken or if the rand strengthens, the arb increases, which just result in below-average profits.

If you catch it on a bad day like yesterday where the Rand significantly strengthened (about 30c) after converting to USD and rapid btc movement, then it can result in a loss or very low profit for that day, depending on how big the trade was. The trade of R200k from yesterday resulted in only R300 profit whereas the previous day’s trade of R240k resulted in a R2,880 profit. The rand looks like it is doing funny stuff again, so I didn’t book a trade for today.

You are limited to R11m worth of trades per year (or R22m with your spouse). The idea is to spread those out throughout the year which should result in a 1-2% return overall. So for a single person, you’re looking closer to R10-R15k returns per month and with your spouse, you’re looking closer to R20k returns per month (average 1.2% of R1.8m of trades per month).

But for context, December was a very tough month and my wife’s trading profit for December was only 0.72%. However, for November and December we just traded every day regardless of market conditions because we had to use as much of her FIA allowance as possible before the end of the year. Usually though I would check the market first and determine if it would be a good day to trade or not. Shiftly provides a Telegram bot where you can check the current arb and fx rates before booking your trade.

Here are some more stats from when we started trading. The month and the % profit on my trades each month.

  • June 1.1%
  • July 1.5%
  • August 1.5%
  • September 2.3%
  • October 1.2%
  • November 0.97%
  • December 0.72%
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#18

I mean, it’s not like 0.72% growth in a month is bad, by any means. A quick calc shows me you got an annualised growth of around 17%, which is great, IMO.

#19

And December was exceptionally bad and not strategically traded. But it would still be worth it even if it only generated R5000 per month. It is a low risk trade and had I left the R200k in a high interest savings account, I would have only gotten 4% which comes to about R667 per month.

I suppose a smarter way to do this would be to trade the R200k, and then split the profits each month. Withdraw or use half and send the other half to Easy Equities and invest in shares and index funds and maybe even crypto. Two years down the line those profits can very likely triple or more, depending on how it was invested.

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#20

Ja, but this is the wrong way of thinking about it. You should either compare it to other investments with similar risk, or use a risk-based value like Sharpe ratio to compare. The 4% number is only useful as a no-risk baseline rate.

For comparison, my ZA portfolio on EE is sitting at ~9% (I recently cleaned up a couple of investments that bit me, so it’s down a bit) and my US portfolio is at ~22% (after yesterday’s bloodbath).
Your suggestion of splitting out profits makes sense - you’ll be reducing your total portfolio risk at the cost of some growth, but it’ll be worth it if any one of the markets suddenly turn.