Finance Explorer Portable for Windows

Metalogic's Finance Explorer is a simple, free, open-source tool for managing your personal finances. It's compatible with Quicken, Microsoft Money, and other financial programs. It supports OFX, OFC, and QIF formats, so it can import and manage transaction data from most banks, a huge time-saver over entering everything manually. It can manage your checking, saving, credit, investment, loan, and cash accounts, in any number. It can download stock quotes from online sources, display monthly transactions or net worth, and help you set up a personal budget using an intuitive process. We sampled a fully portable version of Finance Explorer from PortableApps.

As with other programs made portable by the good folks at PortableApps, Finance Explorer Portable includes all the data necessary to run the program in its download; all you have to do is extract it to a folder of your choice and click the executable file to launch it. Since the whole thing is compact, it's a great choice for a USB drive, memory card, or similar storage device.

As you might expect with a name like Finance Explorer, the program has an Explorer-style interface, with a tree view for navigation in the left-hand sidebar and a main window with Web-style links to the various features and tools. We were grateful that the program supplies sample data since that's often the best way to learn how to use personal finance tools. But there's also an online tutorial that makes it even easier to set up bank accounts and other personal data. There's a browser-based Help file, too, though some Windows users might have to open it directly from the program's folder. Under Options, we entered our bank's URL to enable updated quotes on savings, credit card, or any other accounts.

Each heading contains labels for the various functions; each displays a simple, basic but totally clean and efficient list view of transactions, accounts, and other data. Clicking the draggable headings sorted the data to suit, and we could save, export, and print selections. Under a Notes heading we could enter comments and reminders. With broad compatibility and efficient functionality, Finance Explorer Portable works for us.