FlowTorch: Free Finance Management With an Envato Marketplace Twist

If there’s one thing that everyone, office workers and freelancers alike, dread, it’s tax time. No one likes parting with their hard earned money, but worst of all, you’ve got to have your finances organized too. That can be worse than writing a check to the government.

It’s not uncommon to struggle with keeping up with your finances, especially if you’re working multiple jobs or doing freelance work on the side. You need an easy way to keep up with everything without costing you more precious time. Problem is, most accounting apps are rather pricey, even more so if you need to do more than standard personal finance tracking.

That’s why I was excited to hear about FlowTorch on our Envato Notes blog. FlowTorch is a new free finance management app made by someone who was tired of expensive finance apps or apps that bombard you with offers from banks. So, he set out to make a simple and free finance app using tons of resources from the Envato Marketplaces.

Intrest piqued yet? Keep reading to see if this tool has what you need to make accounting a little less trying.

A Simple Vision for Freelancer Finances

Finances have no reason to be so complex. If you boil down any financial app, or for that matter, a paper finances log book, you essentially need to keep track of the money you receive, income, and the money you spend, expenses. You’ll also need to keep track of when those transactions happened, and you’ll need to know the total income, expenses, and your account balance. Doesn’t sound too complicated, right?

FlowTorch includes just the basics, but it does so in a way that makes it easy to keep up with them. You’ll of course need to create an account first, and shortly thereafter you’ll get a confirmation email. Once you’ve logged in, you can customize your account further in the settings by adding your preferred currency format.

FlowTourch sports a clean design with just the features you need to simply mange finances. The main page shows an overview of your income, expenditures, and transactions. From the top menu bar, you can add multiple accounts to keep up with, say, your income from several businesses separately. You’ll also be able to access your transactions and statements, and add new transactions.

Adding Your Financial Info

Before you get started adding your income and expenses, it’s a good idea to add a few categories to help you keep track of everything easier. You can view your categories from the Transactions tab, and then add new ones as you need. Each category by default will be available for both expenses and income, but if you want to categorize your expenses and income separately, you could choose to only use a category in Income or Expenditures.

Now you’re ready to start adding your payments and expenditures. Payments are your income you’ve received, while expenditures are the things you’ve spent money on. You could use this to manage your own personal finances, putting down your paycheck and, perhaps, Envato Marketplace or other earnings as Income, and then your groceries or Starbucks receipts as expenditures. You can then categorize everything as you want, perhaps by job or company or however works best for you. On the bottom, you can set the date from a nicely designed calendar, add the amount (only enter the numbers without your currency symbol), and a note to help you remember what this was all about. If you need more info, you can add up to 5 files to your transaction so you can keep up with exactly what the money was used for or earned with.

Best of all, you can set up recurring expenses or income, which is a great way to automatically keep up with your hosting costs or internet bill or anything else that happens on a schedule. Recurring payments can happen daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, which should cover most of your regular bills.

Taking Your Financial Data Further

Adding transactions is quick and easy, and it should be fast enough to add everything that happens as it’s going on. Later, then, when you need to sit down and look at your finances, FlowTorch helps you find what you’re looking for. You can sort your transactions by type, category, or by a variety of date options. Unfortunately, there’s not an option to search through transactions, and that would definitely be a helpful feature that’d be nice to see in the future.

Back on the dashboard, you’ll be able to get a quick overview of your finances each time you login to FlowTorch. The graph will show the exact income and expenses for each particular date, which is an interesting approach that would work great for businesses with sales and expenses daily. However, it ends up looking a bit odd for a freelancer with income a couple times a month, so it would be nice to have more flexible chart styles. Still, with a quick overview of your recent transactions on the bottom, and your balance on the top, the dashboard is a good place to get reminded of where your money’s going.

Best of all, you can take your data with you. Click the Statements link to download automatically generated monthly statements in Excel XML format. Unfortunately, iWork Numbers and Google Docs Spreadsheets don’t open these XML files correctly, but they look great in Excel and include all the data you’ve added. We’d love to see support for CSV output so you could use your data in any spreadsheet, but it’s definitely promising that such a new product already has any export options.

Conclusion

So, is FlowTorch perfect? Nope, but neither is any app. For a free app, it’s nicely designed thanks to the great GraphicsRiver resources used in it. It’s also easy to use, and much simpler to get started with than many other financial apps. With basic support for exporting transactions and sharing your account with others, it’s a nice mix of features with a great price: free. We’ll be excited to see how they continue to develop FlowTorch going forward. For now, if you’ve been looking for a better way to keep up with your income and expenses, give FlowTorch a try. There’s nothing to lose, and you just might find that you like it.