Social Media Metrics For Dummies

Metrics of Finance

Using metrics to track and optimize your personal and business finances is becoming essential in this age of mobile payments, credit cards, and online banking. As money becomes more and more intangible, it’s easy for companies and people that don’t pay close attention to it to falter and lose track.

Many applications and tools are designed to help you study the metrics of your money, many with social features to hold you accountable. Whether you need to collect data for personal or business use, there is something out there for you.

Mint.com by Intuit is possibly the best known of these monetary tools that have a strong metrics layer. Offering goals and reporting through visualizations, you can use Mint.com to figure out where your money is going. After you know the details, you can change your habits, create a budget, optimize spending across categories, and get more bang for your buck. You can also export data to correlate to other metrics you may be tracking in your spreadsheets.

MoneyBook is an iPhone-based money app that helps you track your money metrics on the go (see Figure 20-8). A key feature to note here (and one to look for in other apps) is the export to .csv function that allows you to send this data to spreadsheets so that you can get the full value of your data. This function is useful for taking a look at not only your money, but your expenses and other on-the-go information.

Figure 20-8: MoneyBook uses your iPhone for financial tracking. ...