Keeping all of your various financial statements in order can be a real drag, particularly if they’re still arriving by snail mail. But even if you’re getting them delivered electronically, you’ve still got to figure out where to store them. You’ve also got to do that filing regularly if you don’t want to have a mess on your hands. What a pain!
Enter FileThis: financial productivity at your fingertips. FileThis is an app that acts as your personal and business financial assistant. Tom’s Guide listed it as one of the “12 best iOS Apps You’re Not Using (But Should Be).” The app (1) saves your bank, credit card, insurance, investment, and similar statements securely in the cloud on the platform of your choosing, e.g., Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box or FileThis Cloud; (2) provides a dashboard showing your account balances and sends an email reminder when bills are due; (3) has free and incredibly affordable paid plans. Let’s look at each of the benefits in greater detail.
1. Financial productivity at your fingertips: All of your statements saved securely in the cloud
FileThis securely connects to over 750 U.S. institutions and service providers. I use the service for my personal and business accounts as well as to keep my nonprofit’s bank statements in order. I’m an Evernote fanatic, so I have my FileThis account set up to deliver all of my statements to Evernote. But I could just as easily have set up the service on Dropbox or Google Drive, which I also use in my business and nonprofit work.
FileThis creates a notebook in Evernote called “FileThis” on initial set-up. Each account that is pulled into Evernote gets its own separate notebook into which account statements are automatically imported. These account notebooks are “stacked” under the FileThis notebook, a way of organizing notebooks as “sub-notebooks” in Evernote. The image below is a snapshot of my Evernote notebook list. Upon setup, FileThis will pull statements from your personal and business accounts going back up to three years.
The statements arrive as searchable PDFs. Pair this attribute with Evernote’s incredible search capabilities and you have a real time-saving tool. Recently, my nonprofit’s accountant sent me an email asking about a transaction that hit the bank statements but did not appear to be in the accounting system over a year ago. Within less than 2 minutes I was able to search for and find the item in a credit card statement in my FileThis Notebook in Evernote. That could have taken hours of valuable time.
This all sounds great, but what about security? The last thing you need is for sensitive financial information to find its way into the wrong hands. Not to worry. FileThis has bank-level security practices, including encryption, auditing, and logging. The company also utilizes third-party services to test the strength of its security.
2. Financial productivity at your fingertips: A comprehensive dashboard & email reminders
FileThis works across platforms (e.g., Windows, Android, iOS) and will instantly give you an overview dashboard for all of your accounts, as shown below.
As shown below, the app also sends email reminders, including weekly notices about the status of accounts and emails on payment due dates.
3. Financial productivity at your fingertips: free & incredibly affordable paid plans
Pricing of FileThis is dependent on the number of accounts, which FileThis calls “connections,” you want to connect to the app. As shown below, 6 or fewer accounts can be connected for free. I pay $20 per year for up to 12 connections, which serves my personal and business needs quite well. It’s such a small price to pay for a tool that does so much to reduce clutter and keep the financial aspects of my personal, business and nonprofit work organized.
You can find out more about FileThis and sign up for a plan by clicking here. FileThis and Evernote are a powerful combination. I’ve written a lot of posts about Evernote, which you can find here. Check out this post to learn about the various free and paid versions of the software available for almost any platform out there. It’s a huge productivity tool that, when paired with other apps like FileThis, can also give you a lot of peace of mind.