Budgeting 101: The Best Apps to Track Your Expenses

If you find it hard to budget your money or worse, you’ve recently been retrenched, it’s time to step back and assess your finances.

Fortunately, it’s never too late to learn financial management skills, especially during this crisis. One of the things you can do to efficiently manage your expenses is to keep a record.

If you don’t want to burden yourself with the complexities of spreadsheets and handwritten notes, here’s a roundup of the best budgeting apps to help you track your expenses and cash flow.

Mobile App	Platform	Price
WalletApp	Android and iOS	Android: P26 — P7,000 iOS: P289 — P1,090
Money Manager	Android, iOS + PC editing	Android: P239  iOS: P199
Monefy	Android and iOS	Android: P149 iOS: P149
Buddy	iOS	P249 — P1,850 per year
Daily Budget	iOS	P149 — P499
Wally	iOS	P469 — P3,290
Spendee	Android and iOS	Android: P43 — P4,990 iOS: P79 (7-day trial) — P599 (per year)
Household Account Book	Android and iOS	Android: P43.97 iOS: P49

WalletApp

Always on the go? WalletApp does a great job of displaying a summary of your finances.

At a glance, the app shows statistics for the last 7 days, 30 days, or 12 weeks of your spending, cash flow, credit, and income, just to name a few. It also shows a graph of all your accounts, allowing you to see the big picture of your current financial status.

Setting up planned payments, whether it’s income or expense, is one of its useful features. That way, you’d figure out your future budget.

WalletApp is for budget-conscious folks who prefer to manage their finances in a visual and data-driven approach with the help of graphs, charts, and statistics.

Money Manager

Money Manager has a good user experience and gives you easy access to your charts and accounts summary.

Upon launching the app, you’ll see your transactions of the day. If you want to review previous activities, simply tap the options for weekly, monthly, or summary of accounts.

The Statistics tab shows your income and expenses, while the Accounts tab gives you an overview of cash on hand, cash on bank accounts, and your payables on credit cards.

Some noteworthy bits about MoneyManager — it supports export, import, and backup via email. You may also set your passcode to secure your content. On top of that, you can take photos of your receipts, food, and items you bought for more detailed tracking.

If you’d like to focus only on tracking income, expenses, credit cards, and liabilities, Money Manager simplifies all that and teaches financial planning for beginners.

Monefy

Monefy allows you to track your expenses using pie charts, icons, and lists — something that will delight users who like nice visuals.

Monefy shows you a chart of your expenses and balances with icons that represent categories of expenses such as car, clothing, and drinks, just to name a few.

You can update your income with the green button or add an expense using the red button.

Adding balances are not limited to cash or payment cards. You can even label them as your balances on PayPal, Stripe, Bitcoin, Savings and more.

Another thing that you’ll find useful is being able to sync data on Google and Dropbox. However, this feature is available on the Pro version.

Monefy’s approach in presenting expenses through icons and graphics also makes it easier for users to interpret their current financial status in a visually appealing way. It’s a great option for beginners like students and young professionals.

Buddy

Thinking of splitting the bills at home? Buddy helps you sort the expenses with your spouse or family and household members.

Buddy’s user interface is almost the same as Monefy which also uses a pie chart to show your expenses. The icons are based on the iPhone’s emojis ―and you can even edit the names.

Buddy allows you to set reminders so you won’t forget logging in your expenses. If you need a backup, you can export your transactions via .CSV files to edit them on Excel or Google spreadsheets.

If you’re okay to spend on an expense tracker, Buddy Premium offers a 1-month, 3-month, and 12-month subscription. However, if you only need basic expense tracking, the free version is enough.

Daily Budget

Daily Budget comes with a minimalist user interface. It’s a ‘freemium’ app that helps you track expenses but also motivates you to save more money.

There are only three categories to simplify your daily budgeting. It’ll show you a record of your regular income, recurring expenses, and savings. A summary of the appropriate budget is also displayed based on the data you enter.

There are quite a few exciting features that are useful for people who have side hustles. Under the Extra Incomes category, you can record your past, ongoing, and future incomes.

All in all, Daily Budget is for people who just want to record transactions and expenses without the fancy stuff. Its Pro version gives you access to an in-depth analysis of your expenses and savings.

Wally

Wally has robust features to make sure you can track expenses, income, and cash flow like a professional. It may overwhelm a beginner as it has a steep learning curve. However, once you get the hang of it, expense tracking will become a habit.

You may connect your bank accounts, credit cards, and online wallets to get the most out of its features (the app allows you to connect your accounts on BPI, BDO, and Metrobank).

You can categorize your expenses to stay organized. The app also shows a chart to see how much you’ve been spending on different categories. Unlocking the family and joint accounts also helps you manage finances with family and friends.

Overall, Wally is ideal for folks looking for an app with advanced financial planning and management features.

Spendee

If you want to build good financial habits, Spendee will help you with that on top of being a budget and money tracker.

With Spendee, you can connect your bank accounts and cards, e-wallets, and add cash manually to maximize its features. You’ll also be able to track your cash flow and understand your buying habits because there’s a graph to show you where your money goes and how you spend.

The Smart Budgeting feature helps you not to overspend in a category using a list and percentages. It supports multiple currencies, shared wallets, and sync and backup.

Spendee is for people who use cards and cashless payments as it unifies and tracks the spending habits.

Household Account Book

Who says saving money and tracking finances are boring? Not with the Household Account Book.

This budget app uses animations and stories to make sure you’re logging into your transactions. To keep you motivated, it has stories that’ll pique your curiosity. However, you need to log transactions for a required number of days to unlock each story.

The categories look so adorable as all of them are represented by cute cartoons. It’s pretty simple to use as you only need to log your income and expenses and tag your expenses with a category to stay organized.

The app is perfect for people who love fancy stuff and are not looking for advanced features. It’s free to use, but you can get rid of the ads with a one-time payment.

 

Budgeting is made a lot easier with mobile apps. So which among these eight apps do you think will help you track your expenses effectively?