J
Jared Peters
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It’s the start of a new year, and for a lot of people, that means New Years resolutions. Some things, like finally getting in shape, can be pretty tough resolutions to keep, but there are plenty of other things you can pick that are much easier to manage. One popular resolution is to better manage your budget and finances, and that’s where this guide is going to come in handy. We’re going to go over the best available Android apps to help you track your spending, expenses, and bills for the new year.
Mint
Mint is a powerful budgeting tool and service that helps you track your monthly bills, income, and spending. One of the best features Mint has is that it pulls all of your financial information together and displays it under one account. Your bank accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, etc. are all consolidated into one place to see. If you handle multiple accounts with all of your money, this is helpful because it keeps everything together and updates automatically so you won’t have to manage a checkbook or check several different sites or apps for your money.
Aside from the basics of Mint, it also has many tools to help you keep up with your budget. Mint breaks down all of your spending into different categories, from entertainment to bills to gas to food, and allows you to view your spending in several different ways. You can sort spending, view individual transactions (from either a checking account or credit card) or see all of your spending in a chart. The chart is useful for determining what’s costing you the most money each month, whether that’s gas, food, or anything else.
Mint also offers several different ways to track bills and accounts. It can be set up to automatically alert you when you have bills coming up, low balances on accounts, or even unusual spending on any of your accounts. The app (on both phone and tablet) can do this, or you can set it up to send you emails and text messages. On top of that, Mint will send you monthly emails detailing how you’ve spent your money and suggestions for improving your budget and savings.
Mint is one of the most fully featured apps on this list, as it just offers a ton of ways to do a ton of different things. If you’re looking for something to act as a personal budget assistant and automatically help you track your money, Mint is the way to go.
Ledgerist
Ledgerist is a very basic app compared to something like Mint. It’s essentially a digital ledger for your checkbook on your phone, which is handy for cutting down on how much you have to write to balance a checkbook and multiple accounts.
With Ledgerist you have the option to set up different accounts, which you can name anything you want. Obviously to get the most use out of the app, you would want names like “checking account,” “credit card,” or “cash,” but it’ll accept anything. After setting a starting balance for each account, you can then add transactions, which are either deposits or withdrawals, and that’s more or less the point of the app.
Ledgerist doesn’t offer any ways to integrate into existing accounts or to update anything automatically, so you’ll have to manually input each time you spend any money or have any money deposited to an account. If you’re looking for something to handle your finances automatically without much input, Ledgerist won’t fit the bill. If you need a quick way to jot down how much money you’re spending, however, it’s simple and does the job exceptionally well.
Aside from tracking and displaying your spending, you can organize all of your transactions. Each transaction can be named and can have notes applied to it, as well as a date. This is helpful for sorting out your transactions to see how much you’re generally spend on specific things, like movies or going out to eat. Again, it’s not going to do much automatically, but it’s a very useful tool for someone wanting to organize their spending.
It’s clearly a pretty basic application, but sometimes basic is the best option. Ledgerist does cost $1.99 in the Play Store, and the interface is a little dated, but if you know you only need something small and simple, it’s worth checking out.
Manilla
Manilla is a fully-featured app that conveniently brings all of your accounts and bills into one place. It goes beyond just managing your bills and money accounts and adds in things like subscription services and travel rewards as well as your standard bank accounts, credit cards, and monthly bills.
To start off with, you’ll create a Manilla account, then individually add accounts to keep track of. Manilla supports over 3,000 different types of accounts, which includes your traditional credit cards, bank accounts, and normal bills, but also covers things like magazine subscriptions and Netflix. All of these accounts are automatically updated and kept within the app, so it’s easy to glance over your entire financial situation. On top of that, Manilla is an excellent tool to keep up with your bills. You can easily check different billing statements, set up reminders, and best of all, Manilla can pull an image of your bill or statement for you to save, email, or print. It’s almost like having all of your paperwork filed away in an app instead of taking up space in a drawer.
In the off chance that Manilla doesn’t support the type of account you want to track, (or for something like your rent) it does support custom billing and reminders. Overall, it’s extremely flexible to get Manilla to track what you need it to.
You can manage your Manilla account across smartphones, tablets, and a web interface, so it’s available just about anywhere. If you need a powerful solution that also offers a ton of flexibility, Manilla is free and definitely worth checking out.
Check
Pageonce has been around for a while, but it’s name has recently changed to Check. Check takes a slightly more hands-on approach to handling your money than some of the other apps on this list; instead of just showing you your current financial status and reminding you to pay bills, Check will actually pay your bills for you. Unfortunately, you’ll still have to supply the money, but it’s convenient either way.
To start using Check, you’ll have to input your different accounts that you want to manage, such as your credit card and debit account. After that, Check will monitor your funds and bills, and if you’d like, it will even automatically pay bills for you. You can set up Check so that on the 18th of each month, it will automatically pay your DirecTV, Verizon, and credit card bill. You’ll never have to worry about accidentally making a late payment again.
Now with most apps that would try to take on paying all tof these bills, the problem would be that it would only support a handful of different accounts. That’s not the case with Check, though, as it supports just about everything you can imagine. Cable and satellite companies, phone bills, credit cards, and even mortgages and utilities are covered. There’s an incredible list of things that Check can handle for you.
If you stress about financial security, you might worry that letting an app handle your bills seems dangerous, but Check uses bank-level, triple layer security to safeguard your personal information. It supports pin-locking the app, remote wiping, and Check’s services are monitored by third-parties such as McAfee and Verisign.
If you have a ton of bills to manage or you just forget to make payments on time, Check is worth a spin. It’s free, so definitely give this one a test drive.
Financial Calculators
No list of apps to manage a budget would be complete without some kind of calculator. In this case, we have the versatile Financial Calculators, an app that is stuffed to the gills with different kinds of calculators to figure out how much money you’re going to be spending (or losing.)
Obviously, this is all stuff you can figure out on your own with a basic calculator, but Financial Calculators takes the stress out of that and does it for you. It can handle basic stuff like how much you should tip, credit card repayments, interest rates, and minimum payments. Financial Calculators will tell you how long it’s going to take you to pay off that particular account. If you need to handle something a little more complex, it can also figure out car loan payments, which calculates a payment based on the car’s worth, your trade-in car value, interest charges, down payments, and anything else you might need.
If that’s not enough, it also does regular loans and refinancing calculations, retirement and 401k funds, APR calculations, ROI calculations, stocks, and, believe it or not, it even includes a basic calculator, too. For a free app, it can impressively take on nearly any kind of financial equation you can throw at it.
You won’t be able to manage your entire budget with just Financial Calculators, but it compliments the other apps on this list very nicely. Even if you don’t need anything else to manage your budget, this is a great app to have to double-check your math, just in case.
These are five of the top apps on Google Play to help you keep an eye on your spending and budget. Are there any other apps you use to keep an eye on your money that we missed? Sound off in the comments and let us know.
Come comment on this article: The 5 Best Android apps for managing your budget [January 2014]
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