Expense Balance App

[unidentified8]

Does anyone know of or can reccomend a good app for balancing expenses? i am starting college soon and I want to start doing a better job of keeping tabs on my spending habits. I just need to be able to keep track of expenses and group them by tags like eating out, groceries, bills, etc and then be able to see a summary by month, year and what most of my money goes to. I could always make a spreadsheet in Excel, but I was hoping for something more straight forward and user friendly. Thanks in advance!

[RollyShed]

It would be hard to get anything simpler than a simple spreadsheet using LibreOffice Calc (free). However a "proper" accounting app would be GnuCash (free).

[Avocado Diaboli]

I personally have been using Spendee for quite a while. Has an mobile app and you can also use it on desktop browsers. Features all the stuff you ask for (categories as well as tags) and it can give you summaries by weeks, months and years. It also allows for recurring transactions so if you've set automatic transactions with your bank for rent or monthly bills that always cost the same, like internet or phone plans, you set them up once and forget about them. They also seem to have direct integration with certain banks, but I haven't tried that. First, because my bank isn't available and second, I have a few reservations about just flat out giving access to to my financial data at a bank to private corporation. If you want you can also export the data from the app in CSV or XLS formats for further processing and analysis. 

 

I use the tags to group transactions from individual businesses so I can track those over a bunch of different categories. Oh, and I've never paid for it. There is a paid tier that allows for a few more features, but the basic ones to just track spending are perfectly viable with the free tier. 

[LogicalDrm]

The GNU Cash noted above is something I've used. It was bit too much for my needs. Needs time to setup and time to keep things in check. For that, basic account balancing with Excel/LibreCalc is easier and faster.

 

Last year and early this year I was using Android app called MoneyManager. Also, pain and timetaking to setup, but after that it worked almost flawlessly. It has issues with recurring transfers (rent, phone/internet, paycheck) where you can't set certain dates, or more specifically times when transfer occurs. Meaning that there would be oddities needing to be corrected. Also it doesn't handle stocks/bonds so for that something else is better. Which for me was annoying since stocks/bonds were about half of my account balancing act.

 

At the moment I'm more on manual side of things. Keeping eye on account balance couple times a month, trying to update stock/bond values once a month (I'm not active trader, they have been my "last resort"). My bank has additional app that keeps tabs on debit/credit card usage and since 70% of monthly payments uses those, its working nicely.