When you go out on your own, there comes that moment where you feel a little panicked about the management of your money. With the freedom of being your own boss, there comes the full responsibility over every aspect of your business.

Having a good tool to track and visualize exactly where your money is coming and going is vital to a healthy business. Especially for those of us who have a poor track record with managing our funds. Pulse is a one such tool.

I mentioned Pulse last week in our list of 50 web apps for freelancers. It was a late entry to the list as I had only recently heard of it. Being a small business owner myself, I’m in the market for some type of accounting/cash management tool. I was curious to see if Pulse would fit the bill (sorry, had to do it).

CashFlow

What I liked right off the bat was that the first place Pulse takes you is the Cash Flow. It’s like the Dashboard of most other apps and gives you the big picture of your income and expenses. And across the top is a total of your overall cash on hand for each month.

As well, the cash flow can be viewed by weekly increments or an overall list view. The list view is another great summary view of where things are coming and going.

But before you can get these great summaries of your cash flow, you have to put something into the app. The individual items are broken down into incomes, expenses and categories of each.

Incomes and Expenses

Adding income is straightforward. As you can see from the screenshot below, it has all the fields you would expect from such a tool. It also allows for recurring items — handy for those of us whose business activities are fairly consistent.

Once an income has been added, you can also add notes or attach files.

Also, you can assign an income to a project (which is in turn associated with a company). Once you start adding in these various items, Pulse starts to build a nice view of who is becoming your most valuable clients.

Similarly, the expenses you add will help you to get the big picture. You might say this is the most important part of the application — any good business owner knows that minimizing your costs is the best way to run a healthy business.

Pulse does a good job of helping you identify where you’re spending your money.

Categories

When adding incomes and expenses, you want to assign them to categories. This is how Pulse will help you summarize where things are coming or going by adding all the individual items up for you. You can add new categories on the fly.

Or you can go to the Settings tab and manage your categories there.

Either way, be consistent and disciplined about adding in your categories. It’s essential to getting the true picture of the health of your business.

Reports

One of the nicest touches with the application are the nice reports. It’s a lovely way to see your income and expenses and cash on hand for each month.

You might be asking, “What’s the difference between the Cash Flow dashboard view and the Income and Expenses reports?”

Think of it like this — the Cash Flow is your ledger, a spreadsheet type of view of your items. The report shows the same data, but in graph form, allowing you to see how your money coming in stands up to your money going out, as well as the overall current cash on hand.

As well, the cash flow limits your time frame viewable while the report allows you to choose whatever dates you want to see.

On a side note, I’d have to say that I’m not usually a big fan of Flash. More often than not, it detracts from the user experience. But when well placed, it can improve the overall usability of an application or web site.

I think Pulse is one of those apps that gets it right. The graphs are a nice usage, giving the user some interaction with the data they are viewing. Hovering over items in the graph gives you additional information — it’s a nice touch.

As well, the categories and companies reports are also nice, giving you a pie chart breakdown of each item.

Companies

The last area to touch on is the last tab on the Pulse interface. This is where you get an overview of those companies that are making you the most money and which ones are costing you the most. It’s also where you add the projects that are related to each company.

As I noted above, I think that what makes this app well done is the great visualizations of your data. The overall incomes and expenses report is best communicated in a combination bar graph with points for your cash flow. Your categories are best viewed in the pie chart seen above.

And the companies report is also well thought out. In this case, you get a summary of each company and how much money they bring you in compared with what they cost you.

It’s a good way to see which companies are truly the most profitable for your overall business.

And the Grand Total Is …

Overall, I think Pulse is a great tool. It’s not overly flashy, but the visual overviews in the Cash Flow and the reports are very nicely done. It’s simple, clean app that is no way cluttered with useless features. It appears to do exactly what you need it to — help you monitor the financial health of your business. I would recommend it anyone running their own show.

In addition, it allows you to sync your information from Basecamp or Highrise — companies or projects from Basecamp or companies and deals from Highrise (deals are treated as projects in Pulse). Seeing as so many businesses use 37signals apps, Pulse is a nice addition to the tool belt.