Expense Tracking! Snore! Not Anymore!

Expense tracking, two words to make you snore. It is boring. But, no, not at all, not true anymore.

In my early working days (yeah, dinosaur era, before the smartphone existed), I used to manually track expenses on a spreadsheet and build pretty graphs at the end of the month. It was always a massive pain to make the bank account tally with my spreadsheet number. I must have done this process for a few months at the most, then I gave up. After which I used to just keep a high-level budget and if at the end of the month the number in the bank account was in the same postcode, I was ok. 

Now, we live in a smartphone and app world. Things are super easy. All you need is an app. You can create budgets, track expenses and be on top of your bank accounts, all at the tap of a finger. No excuse left to not have and track a budget. 

It means sharing your finance/expense data, but hey, with google around I don’t think anything is unknown anymore. The clouds know when I woke up, where I went today, who I spoke to and probably what I said as well. So, in my book, it is a very small price to pay for the convenience of it. Of course, that does not mean I will install just any app and give it permissions to access my life’s secrets. I am a little anal about app permissions and restrict them, as far as I can. 

While I was a little flippant above, I need to emphasise that this is an area to be really careful about. These apps will typically gather data for you by reading your SMS messages. They will collect all transaction data that gets generated. By allowing them access to your SMS information you are actually opening up every little financial detail to the apps. You need to be wary and careful. Read the reviews of the app you want to install, look up the parent company, decide if you would trust them. I can see many apps adding expense tracking to their offerings, as that is a goldmine of user behaviour data. Be careful who you share it with.  

I have been using ‘Walnut‘, they claim to be India’s #1 app for money management. I find them to be really effective at what they do. Another app on my phone which can help with money management is the Microsoft ‘SMS Organizer’. I would also recommend this app purely for SMS management. It has simplified SMS for me. It automatically segregates all the SMSes into buckets and weeds out spam. It also tells me my account balances across bank accounts, wallets etc. It can provide reminders for bill payment. 

Back to walnut, I find this app to be comprehensive enough for total expense tracking. Walnut will automatically assign categories to your expenses, you might need to vet/edit some of those. This is a one-time activity. After that, it will tell you how much money you are spending in different areas of your life. Bill reminders available here. Yeah, it can make pretty graphs as well.  

Armed with such an app you can easily reconcile your expenses against your plans. 

Of course, you need a plan (we will do a separate post on that). Build your budget and then use an app to help you track your expenses and stay on track to achieve your goals.