Budget: a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions. ~A.A. Latimer

Do you know how much money you spend in a month? Do you know the percentage of your expenses on different categories like food, entertainment or health/medicine? It is good to keep an eye on the income and expenses. This will help you be aware of your financial situation and you will know how much to save for a rainy day.

In earlier times, people used notebooks (the paper variety) and pens to track and calculate monthly expenses and savings. Then we moved to excel sheets in our personal computers. In today’s technology enabled world, we can track our expenses, set payment reminders and manage bills all with a few taps and clicks with a variety of applications available for smart phones. Here are some apps that are worth checking out:
Toshl Finance
This is an application that is easy to use, easy to customize and a good tool to track expenses, bills and your budget. It allows you to set a daily, weekly as well as a monthly budget. You can create various tags that can be used to classify the expenses. You can then add your spends and check whether you are within your budget or are overspending across different timelines. Toshl allows you to export expenses records to Excel compatible file formats. They can be uploaded to the cloud as well. Once they are in the cloud, you can access it from any browser or device that supports the technology. It is available for free on iOS, Android and Blackberry.

MoneyLover – MoneyLover is available for iOS and Android. You can track your income and expenses in it. Moneylover also allows you to set reminders for transactions. You can set budgets for different expense categories for various time periods. It is available for 45 currencies and supports many languages. MoneyLover also generates reports and has handy tools like currency converter and interest rate calculator. It is also a free application.

Expense Manager is a complete personal finance application for Android. Some of the key features are:

• Expenses and incomes can be tracked by week, month and year as well as by expense categories.
• You can schedule payments and recurring payments like electricity bill too. So the expense is added to a category that you have set. For example if you have a category like “Utilities” then payment towards electricity bills would be added to this category.
• You can have payment alerts.
• Users can generate dynamic reports. Users can also export the data to excel files and thus can do more analysis.
• The data can be stored in Cloud in this tool also.

There are many other tools available in the market. Expensify is quite a popular tool. It is free and available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry.  One can add expenses and also tag them with the scanned copies of the receipts. Manila allows users to manage all accounts. Users can access bills, payment reminders etc. in one place.  Then of course there are the bigger applications like Perfios, Quicken or Mint which allow you to manage your entire personal finances. You can manage your portfolio, manage your bank accounts and do a whole lot of other activities.

In future, we would cover Desktop based applications as well, to help you manage your expenses.

Do you use any mobile app to manage your money? We would love to hear about your experience.

Team Getting You Rich