Accounting for personal finances is the first step towards wealth. This is the opinion of businessmen and financial literacy consultants. However, collecting receipts and entering figures in Excel, or writing down all expenses in a notebook is long and boring. Fortunately, modern technologies make our life easier, and today your smartphone can help you keep track of all your expenses and income. The main thing is to install the correct application on it.
Whether it’s grocery shopping at the supermarket, ordering pizza, or going to the cinema, you’ll know where you’ve spent your money. Moreover, you will also need a financial accounting application when traveling.
For example, booking a rental car for your trip is also a noticeable item of spending, even though you managed to find the cheapest pickup truck rental and thus save money. In addition to car rental, plane tickets, and a hotel room are also expenses that you should consider on your trip.
So, the use of applications for monitoring finances is a must if you want to optimize your budget, both at home and on a trip. Check out a few apps that will do their job well.
1Money
Although the application is one of the most popular software solutions on the market, the user can enter data on expenses and income only manually, which is not always convenient. On the other hand, the developers have implemented a rather interesting feature – you can log into your account, after which all your data will be saved to the cloud.
Accordingly, even if you lose your smartphone or uninstall the application, you can easily get all the information back. Plus, 1Money also provides password protection, export to a PC, the ability to set a budget for a certain period, and fairly understandable statistics with graphs.
1Money advantages:
- password protection;
- synchronization of account data with other devices;
- data export to PC;
- widget for quick input;
- ability to set a budget for any period.
Wallet
This application probably has the richest arsenal of banks that can automatically send reports on your expenses and income. Just select the country and then choose the bank in which you have an account. You can also upload a CSV file to see old banking transactions as well.
In manual input mode, the application allows you to add a warranty period if, for example, you bought a smartphone or TV. Here you can also upload a photo of the receipt and the place where you made the purchase.
A separate bonus is that the software automatically synchronizes data with the cloud server, so if you lose your smartphone or delete the application, you won’t lose the data anyway.
Wallet advantages:
- no ads in the free version;
- pin code protection;
- automatic reading of payments from bank cards;
- ability to add a photo of the receipt and enter the warranty period;
- built-in shopping list;
- widget for quick input;
- exchange rates section.
CoinKeeper 3
Quite often, users forget to enter cost data, or they are just too lazy to do it. The developers of this application decided to fix the problem – they implemented automatic transaction recording. You just need to add a bank card, after which any income or expenses will appear in the program. You can even enable categorization and download the history of previous reports.
Naturally, all the basic features, including entering expenses by category, adding your own categories, information about the purchase date, are also at your disposal.
CoinKeeper 3 advantages:
- automatic recording of expenses and income from credit cards;
- two interfaces to choose from;
- built-in basic courses on financial literacy;
- a separate section with debts;
- data synchronization with other devices.
Monefy
Most developers of such applications focus on a large set of functions in order to attract attention with unique features. But the authors of this software focused on simplicity and convenience. In the main menu, Expense and Income are the only buttons. You will also find spending categories. Plus, you can immediately customize them to suit your personal needs. You can visit this site to know about WeInvoice.
Optionally, you can view all expenses by category, add new invoices, create a backup, or even start syncing via Google Drive or Dropbox. Perhaps the application is not the richest in terms of features, but, on the other hand, this is a great option if you want to use concise and simple software.
Monefy advantages:
- extremely simple and concise interface with no unnecessary elements;
- widget for quick input;
- ability to export all data to a CSV file.
Money Lover
This application can automatically record expenses from bank cards too. Also, you have a great opportunity to add a detailed comment when entering expenses in manual mode. Moreover, you can indicate where and when you spent this money and even add a photo of the receipt. This is convenient, for example, if you are afraid of losing a receipt from an important purchase, or if you need to split a restaurant bill between friends.
In addition, Money Lover makes it possible to create an event for a vacation or some kind of trip, in order to take into account expenses only during this period.
Money Lover advantages:
- planning expenses on individual events;
- extended comments in expenses;
- widget for quick input;
- maintaining reports on utility bills;
- separate section for debts;
- export of information to CSV and Excel;
- synchronization with other devices.
Spendee
A huge advantage of the application is the filter by banks – you can enter the name of the bank, or use the search by country. In this case, the application automatically saves all operations.
Of course, you can also add expenses yourself. You need to enter the date and make a note like “Road Trip” or “Fuel”, and attach a photo of the receipt. At the same time, there’s a separate item “Budget” where you can enter the amount available for a month or for any other period. Thus, you can see how much money is still available to you until the end of this period.
Spendee Advantages:
- convenient search by banks and countries;
- ability to attach a photo, add a comment or tag to each expense item;
- budget sharing option.