Two congratulations are in order, first for your graduation, and second for your awareness, early in life, that you can take control of your finances instead of

Two congratulations are in order, first for your graduation, and second for your awareness, early in life, that you can take control of your finances instead of letting your finances control you. Invest in learning how to use Quickbooks. Quickbooks is the industry standard for bookkeeping and accounting - the exact topics your OP references. Mapping (your vocabulary) to Quickbooks terms, you can budget by category (manage your finances), import and categorize your transactions daily (keep track of your finances), and run reports to see actuals vs. budgets (where your money has gone vs. where you planned for it to go). Also, every so often (monthly), you reconcile your categories against your financial accounts (banks, investments, loans, etc.) to make sure everything is in-sync. Quickbooks also has other advanced features to keep track of more complicated bits like depreciating assets, interest-bearing accounts, etc. Your return-on-investment for learning Quickbooks will be many times higher than any other tool. You can grow with the tool as your financial complexity grows, something tools like YNAB can't do; easily handover your financials to an accountant for filing come tax season; transfer the skills you've learned through personal bookkeeping over into running the books for a side business. To get started, I'd suggest taking a class that teaches how to use Quickbooks for personal finances, or hiring a bookkeeper to setup your books and teach you how to run them to meet your goals.