From generating income to saving, effective financial management requires a great deal of planning, recording, and goal-setting. A 2021 survey by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) showed that 41% of Filipinos can only answer one of three financial literacy questions correctly and only 8% can answer all three.
Maybe you are having trouble with tracking how much money you’ve earned and spent in a week or wondering where that Php 100 went. Many are also saving up for something, whether a dream vacation or a new gadget, or raising enough to take your online business to the next level. With plenty of money matters to remember, big and small, how can you stay on top of your finances with minimal error?
Here is how Lista, a free financial management superapp for MSMEs and individuals, can help you get started.
Track your transactions effectively
Efficient and accurate tracking of your money is key to maintaining financial stability. However, many of us neglect recording out-of-pocket expenses or make accidental miscalculations when recording finances on a notebook, leading to inaccurate records. Lista’s ‘Money In, Money Out’ allows you to easily record every transaction without wifi or data and shows you a real time count of your total income and profit for your day, week, month, and year.
To use this, click on ‘Money In’ for whenever you receive money and ‘Money Out’ for expenses. For businesses, each transaction also allows you to attach the contact details of the customer to the transaction, straight from your contacts app. For added detail, you can include a personal note for each transaction for your convenience.
Make sense of the numbers with charts
With so many numbers, it can be hard to make sense of your personal financial habits and activity. Lista’s Charts feature simplifies all the data you have on the app into three simple charts: Expenses, Income, and Balance.
Charts give you a clear view of your averages and trends by month and by week, helping you make more informed financial decisions.
Save big and aim for higher sales
Lista’s most recently added features, Savings and Sales Targets, aim to help you set goals for savings and sales.
By using the ‘Savings’ feature, you can add as many savings goals or ‘challenges’ and record how much money you want to set aside for each goal. Each savings challenge has its own target amount, frequency of adding money into the pile, and an optional deadline.
You can record additions into the savings amount and withdrawals with ease, similar to the app’s ‘Money In, Money Out’ feature. This feature makes saving money easier to commit to, and the convenience of seeing your progress is good motivation to continue to save.
Similarly, the ‘Sales Target’ feature helps business owners set goals on sales. The feature lets you set a daily goal and a total goal for the month. Sales can be recorded directly onto the app and your goal progress will be updated automatically.
Lista also recently added an ‘Inventory’ feature, which lets business owners add items based on the category and add information such as item cost, markup percentage, selling price, and stocks, and keep track of stock count to capture every sale and avoid overstocking.
Earn back the money you’re owed, problem-free
“Pwede ‘bang mag-pautang?” is a phrase that many of us have heard, whether from customers, friends, or relatives that need money in a pinch. Sometimes, these debts go unpaid for a long time, but we avoid reminding people of their debts to not appear greedy out of ‘hiya.’
There is nothing shameful about wanting to be repaid what is rightfully yours. Lista’s founders decided to create an ‘Utang’ feature that helps you record, manage, and earn back your money in a shame-free way, with Filipino culture in mind.
By attaching a customer’s contact information from your phonebook to the ‘Utang’ feature, you can start making a record of how much money that customer owes you, and whether that debt has been repaid. Every transaction made with that customer’s information attached automatically triggers Lista’s ‘Payment Reminders’ feature, which sends the customer a free, automated SMS reminder of their debt, letting them know that they owe you money while avoiding a potential case of ‘hiya.’
Financial management can be a stressful and overwhelming task, but with Lista’s many free features, it can become much simpler. Download the Lista app from the App Store or Google Play, and start making better financial decisions today. You can also visit Lista’s Facebook page and website for more updates and information.