Why keep a stack of bills when you can easily manage your income and expenses from your mobile phone? You can track your bills, manage your budget, plan ahead, and more, courtesy some of the widely popular budgeting apps. Sudhir Chowdhary & Mohd Ujaley check out some of the free tools that offer easy, real-time tracking of expenses
Goodbudget
If you are looking for a mobile app that can help you in home budget planning, this free app from Dayspring Technologies could be your best bet. Based on the traditional envelope system of putting allocated amount of cash into actual envelopes per month, this app helps in virtually creating a budget based on the cash flow and offers easy, real time tracking of expenses. With this app, you can bifurcate your monthly budget and can understand where you are spending more. The app has some interesting features that allows a user to assign time frame to recurring expenses. It automatically syncs across devices and Web and data is automatically and securely backed up to Goodbudget’s website. Overall, a good solution to track finances. It is available for Android, iOS and Web devices.
AndroMoney
Available for Android and iOS devices, AndroMoney is a personal finance app for use on your mobile phone. By using this tool, a user can better manage his/her finances. Daily accounting, managing categories, or even drawing detail reports, AndroMoney can easily manage it. The app is easy to use and permits multiple accounts to be opened. It can sync with other devices and allows cloud storage (Dropbox , Google Docs). A user can create hierarchical categories with custom attributes and the app is able to present simple, detail and custom budgets. There’s a number pad with calculation and password protection on this app. It also presents trend, pie and bar charts for expense and cash flow. An easy to read overview of your expense and income summary will get you hooked on to this simple app.
Mvelopes
Mvelopes helps in making more informed budget decisions and future plans by presenting the real time status of available finance in an easy-to-understand way. Once you download the app from Google Play or App Store, it asks you some simple questions about your financial goals and then you have to sync your bank account. Since, the app directly works with financial institutions to track every debit and credit transactions, it takes security very seriously and sends several email confirmations before syncing up. Once synced, it asks you to define income and create a budget before filling the spending envelopes. After loading the accounts, the app takes you through defining your income and creating a budget, and then separates spending from the total amount in your bank accounts.
Expensify
Expensify makes capturing receipts, tracking finance and creating expense reports quick and easy. Popular among salespeople and business travelers, this app has both smartphone and web interfaces. It has four big buttons: SmartScan, Add Expense, Track Time and Track Distance. SmartScan lets a user photograph, categorise, and tag receipts, and then add them to expense reports if necessary. One can also enter the merchant name, total amount spent, and date for each expense. This is good for anyone who wants to save receipts but doesn’t want to hang on to a paper copy. The Track Distance option is helpful for freelancers who travel by car and need to bill by distance; they can track by the odometer, or just turn on location and use the GPS option available in the app. All in all, super-slick app.
My Expenses
My Expenses is an Android-based app for tracking daily income and expenses. It works like a finance manager and has rich functionality. The good thing about this app is its simple and pleasant visual presentation. You can manage your expenses and income directly on your smartphone and same could be exported to desktop computer. A user can create expense/transaction with name, amount, date, category and personal expense account. A person can also view months expense summary with total amount for all future months. Expenses for multiple accounts can be created. The free version comes with light and dark themes, whereas paid version of the app offers more features and better options. The only let down is the free version has ads that pop up quite frequently.
