6 Free Finance Apps For Entrepreneurs — Keep Track For Tax Season

Running your own business is always a challenge. From saving money and tax prep, to investing — seeking investors for your company, or just getting paid. Here are six of the best free apps for keeping your financial life together.

1. Lance — Freelance Money Moves

A lightweight business expense tracker that promises to help freelancers, consultants, and small business owners plan for tax time all year by allowing you to predict how much you will owe as you go. Keep your bank accounts, credit cards, earnings, expenditures, invoices, and deductions in-app.

Lance lets you sort expenses into different categories, create sub-categories in spreadsheet mode, then share that data as a spreadsheet. An auto-categorize option hopes to make organizing even easier. Plus, there’s space to leave notes so you won’t forget what you spent all that money on! The Spending Dashboard lets you see your goals and expenses in charts and graphs.

It uses the financial technology platform, Plaid, to connect to your bank account. An Android version will be available soon.

2. Streamtime

Available as a web and iOS app, Streamtime is a project manager that lets you plan budgets (and see when you go over budget), track hours worked, expenses, and purchase orders. You can even create, then send quotes and invoices in a few clicks.

Larger businesses can add team members to each project and choose different hourly fees for each.

The free version allows you five active jobs and limited team members. Upgrading lets you create as many projects as you need, and premium membership supports Xero, Quickbooks, and Zapier integration.

3. Invoice By Wave

This eight-year-old app recently got a makeover, but it’s more than just a new look. They want to help automate mundane tasks with machine learning, fast-track bank payments (claiming that most are processed in two days) and they’ve added more options for paying independent contractors, like you.

With a free account you can send customized invoices to clients, keep tabs on whether or not a payment has come through, send reminders and get notified once you’ve been paid, all in one cloud-based accounting app.

Invoice By Wave is another great way to stay organized for dreaded tax time by taking advantage of its receipt scanning feature and creating reports that can show you what you need to know about your finances.

Guest Collaborator makes it easy to share your information with your accountant or business partner without allowing them access to payments and account settings.

When Payments by Wave is enabled, customers can pay you by credit card after viewing the invoice. This feature uses a pay per transaction pricing model.

Use Checkout to create a link requesting payment in advance, which you can then post online or send directly to a client.

An improved mobile app is also in development.

4. SIFT — Cash Back Automatically

Sift keeps track of what you buy and gets your money back if the price drops up to 90 days after you bought the item. It can even find free extended warranties and returns protections, plus reimburse you for car rental insurance, lost luggage, cancelled bookings, and flight delays — which is useful if you have to foot the bill for your business related travel. Another feature reminds you when to use certain credit cards to get the maximum rewards benefit.

5. Scout Finance

If you are looking for a better way to keep tabs on your investments Scout Finance, which is owned by money.net, can help you stay up to date on stock news by tracking and analyzing your favorite companies’ data through financial statements, earnings reports, and analytics. You can even create stock charts.

6. New Chip — Invest In Startups

New Chip lets you compare and invest in a slew of different small businesses and startups. Choose from traditional options like breweries and real estate, or get onboard with up and coming cryptocurrency and blockchain based enterprises. A great place to raise funds for your business and a boon to micro-investing, with the minimum requirement set at $100. Once you select a company you’ll be directed to an investment platform like Mr. Crowd or WeFunder which handle the transactions.

Remember, some apps store your information in the cloud so it’s always a good idea to check over the privacy policy and terms of use before you start. Knowing how companies use your data can be important, especially where your financial security is concerned.