Personal Capital Free Financial Planner Application
What you'll learn
- What the Personal Capital Software is and how it can be used
- How Personal Capital Software compares to other accounting and financial management software
- How to access and set up the free software
- How to use financial data to create an income statement
- The benefits of having net worth or balance sheet data in one location
- How to access and use investment tools and analysis
- How to use the financial planning tools like a retirement planner
- How to use a home appraisal tool
- How to add non financial institution assets and liabilities to make the net worth or balance sheet more complete
Requirements
- None
Description
Personal Capital is currently a free software that can connect to financial institutions, pulling in financial asset and liability balances, as well as transaction detail, into one location.
The strong areas of benefit of using Personal Capital software are its ability to provide net worth or balance sheet information, investment management information, and planning tools such as retirement planning and other large planning goals.
The Personal Capital software also downloads transaction detail and allows for the categorization or assigning of accounts and tags that can then be used to generate an income statement. It also has budgeting tools to help with shorter-term cash flow management.
This course will discuss how to set up the Personal Capital software and link to accounts. We will also discuss some reasons why the software may be offered for free and look over Personal Capital data security.
We will compare the Personal Capital software to other types of software that can connect directly to financial institutions and pull financial information, such software generally falling into the category of accounting software that uses the double-entry accounting system or financial management software.
Accounting software using the double-entry accounting system includes packages such as QuickBooks, Xero, & Wave accounting. Although accounting software utilizes financial institution connectivity it generally does so differently than Personal Capital software, which falls into the financial management category. We will discuss the differences in software.
Other financial management and budgeting software include Quicken, Mint, and Microsoft Excel, Excel actually having a template called Money in Excel that has financial institution connectivity.
Learners will practice converting financial data into an income statement by downloading transactions from financial institutions, categorizing them, and then exporting them into Excel for sorting. We will compare the process with what would be done using accounting software like QuickBooks.
The course will discuss the benefits of the personal net worth or balance sheet functionality of Personal Capital software, the software pulling in assets and liability balances automatically for items such as bank accounts, investment accounts like 401(K), savings accounts, CD accounts, credit card balances, mortgage balances, and loan balances.
We will also discuss the benefit of the software providing more detail on our investment holdings and providing insights and suggestions to improve returns and reduce risk. The ability to pull investments into one place allows a more rounded analysis of the data than you may get from one brokerage account analyzed in isolation.
Learners will be able to use the projection planner to help plan for retirement and other large investment items. The Personal Capital software utilizes sophisticated analytical tools including a Monte Carlo Simulation tool.
We will also explore the home appraisal tool offered by the software and we will practice adding non-financial institution assets and liabilities, making our net worth or balance sheet completer and more accurate.
Who this course is for:
- Anybody who wants a tool to help with financial management
- Accountants and bookkeepers who want to compare a financial management tool to accounting software
Instructor
- 4.4 Instructor Rating
- 51,504 Reviews
- 902,007 Students
- 149 Courses
Through working with students from many different schools, Mr. Steele has learned best practices for helping people understand accounting fast. Learning new skills and finding the best way to share knowledge with people who can benefit from it is a passion of his.
Mr. Steele has experience working as a practicing Certified Public Accountant (CPA), an accounting and business instructor, and curriculum developer. He has enjoyed putting together quality tools to improve learning and has been teaching, making instructional resources, and building curriculum since 2009. He has been a practicing CPA since 2005. Mr. Steele is a practicing CPA, has a Certified Post-Secondary Instructor (CPI) credential, a Master of Science in taxation from Golden Gate University, a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Economics with an emphasis in accounting from The University of California Santa Barbara, and a Global Management Accounting Designation (CGMA) from The American Institute of CPA (AICPA).
Mr. Steele has also authored five books that can be found on Amazon or in audiobook format on Audible. He has developed bestselling courses in accounting topics including financial accounting and QuickBooks accounting software.
In addition to working as an accountant, teaching, and developing courses Mr. Steele has helped create an accounting website at accountinginstruction, a YouTube channel called Accounting Instruction, Help, and How Too, and has developed supplemental resources including a Facebook Page, Twitter Page, and Podcasts that can be found on I-tunes, Stitcher, or Soundcloud. Mr. Steele's teaching philosophy is to make content applicable, understandable, and accessible.
Adult learners are looking for application when they learn new skills. In other words, learners want to be able to apply skills in the real world to help their lives. Mr. Steele’s formal accounting education, practical work experience, and substantial teaching experience allow him to create a curriculum that combines traditional accounting education with practical knowledge and application. He accomplishes the goals of making accounting useful and applicable by combining theory with real-world software like Excel and QuickBooks.
Many courses teach QuickBooks data entry or Excel functions but are not providing the real value learners want. Real value is a result of learning technical skills like applications, in conjunction with specific goals, like accounting goals, including being able to interpret the performance of a business.
Mr. Steele makes knowledge understandable by breaking down complex concepts into smaller units with specific objectives and using step by step learning processes to understand each unit. Many accounting textbooks cram way too much information into a course, making it impossible to understand any unit fully. By breaking the content down into digestible chunks, we can move forward much faster.
Mr. Steele also makes use of color association in both presentations and Excel worksheets, a learning tool often overlooked in the accounting field, but one that can vastly improve the speed and comprehension of learning accounting concepts.
The material is also made understandable through the application of concepts learned. Courses will typically demonstrate the accounting concepts and then provide an Excel worksheet or practice problems to work through the concepts covered. The practice problems will be accompanied by an instructional video to work through the problem in step by step format. Excel worksheets will be preformatted, usually including an answer tab that shows the completed problem, and a practice tab where learners can complete the problem along with a step by step presentation video.
Mr. Steele makes learning accounting accessible by making use of technology and partnering with teaching platforms that have a vision of spreading knowledge like Udemy.