5 best free apps to track your expenses and manage money smarter

Indian Express

6 hours ago

In today's digital age, keeping a tab on your expenses can be really tricky at times. With Indians juggling between digital wallets, cards and using cash for certain purchases, managing finances can quickly become a nightmare.
Thankfully, there are a lot of mobile apps that can automatically track your expenses and even help you save some money in the long run. If you are someone who is having a hard time keeping track of how and where you spend your money, try these five free expense tracking and management apps.
With more than 10 million downloads, Axio, previously known as Walnut, is one of the most popular free-to-use expense tracking and management apps of all time.
The app detects and adds all your bank accounts and cards connected to your mobile number and automatically adds your expenses by pulling transaction data from SMS.
It has an easy-to-use interface and can help you set monthly budgets, so you can easily save a certain amount of money for the things you want to buy. Like most expense tracking apps, you also get monthly reminders to pay your credit card, electricity and other bills. If you are running out of money, Axio also offers a pay-later option and personal credit options to select users.
If you are looking for an easy-to-use budget planner, Wallet: Budget and Money Manager might be the one for you. Like Axio, the all-in-one budget planner and expense tracker app lets you connect your bank account to automatically add expense data. It also gives you a detailed report of where you are spending, along with your cash flow.
Users also have the option to track their stock investments and keep track of their progress towards a defined goal. Some advanced features include automatic cloud sync, transaction location mapping, and debt management, to name a few.
If you want to track your expenses down to the last penny, make sure to try Money Manager Expense & Budget by RealByte Inc. This expense tracker has tons of features that make it easy for users to keep a keen eye on where and how they are spending.
Like most apps, it gets daily, weekly and monthly reports and also comes with a built-in asset manager to make budgeting easy. One of the most underrated features is the app's double-entry bookkeeping accounting system, which records your income and expenses as soon as you input data.
You can also turn off or on sub-categories, change the starting date, backup and restore your transactions and even bookmark the most frequent ones. The only downsides are that the free version is ad-supported and the number of assets you can add is limited to 15.
Another popular expense tracker available on Android is AndroMoney. The app has a pretty minimalistic user interface and lets you quickly add all your expenses at the tap of a button. You can also set custom budgets, sync data with other devices, backup to the cloud, and set a password.
The app also has an easy-to-access menu that helps you categorise your expenses, track your budget and get reports in the form of a pie chart, trend chart or bar chart. AndroMoney is also available on iOS and the web.
Don't want to use expense tracking apps that look boring and dig into your bank accounts? Try Meow Money Manager, a visually appealing expense tracking app that makes finance fun. The app comes with more than 200 cute icons to record various expenses like food, bills, car, entertainment and more.
You can get instant statistics of your financial activity on a per-day, weekly, monthly or yearly basis, the option to choose your very own categories and a dedicated option to manage your assets. All your records can also be backed up to cloud storage and locked using biometric authentication.
However, unlike some expense tracking and management apps, which automatically add your expenses using bank or SMS data, you will have to manually enter your expenses into the app. This may not be for everyone, but it definitely is a refreshing experience in a sea full of feature-packed expense tracking apps that look and feel the same.
Anurag Chawake is a Senior Sub-Editor at indianexpress.com. His fascination with technology and computers goes back to the days of Windows 98. Since then, he has been tinkering with various operating systems, mobile phones, and other things. Anurag usually writes on a wide range of topics including Android, gaming, and PC hardware among other things related to consumer tech. His Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn user name is antechx. ... Read More