Best Expense Tracker App – EveryDollar
As someone who usually manually tracks expenses by default, this month I challenged myself to identify the best app to help you track expenses easily. There are many options, but I use the Daily Budget, Wally, EveryDollar and Dollarbird through a squeeze tool for my day to day expenses.
The experiment gave me a new perspective on using expense tracking to limit my budget, and also gave my friends a new sense of my dedication to finance, because every time we left, I ended up standing in a corner investing all my spending on all four apps. before I forget.
Which app turned out to be the best? Well, technically, this budgeting app is more than an expense tracking app. The winner will be the one created by none other than the current king of personal finance, Dave Ramsey.
I’m surprised too. I don’t hate Dave Ramsey; I agree with many of his recommendations for maintaining financial health, although I am skeptical about fully supporting his systems. But for now, financial philosophy aside: I needed an expense tracker that was easy to use, and I found it on EveryDollar .
What’s so great about EveryDollar?
The feature that makes EveryDollar so useful to me is its clean and intuitive setup. When you choose to track expenses, you enter an amount (it automatically inserts a decimal into it), enter a salesperson, and select a category for your purchase. Don’t see a suitable category? You can assign your own and remove those that do not suit you. You can split your purchases into multiple categories if you want (say, if you bought food and shampoo and got a prescription at the grocery store and you want to keep track of your grocery, personal care, and medication spending). There are fields for the check number and any notes. That’s all!
Other apps will try to guess what you spent your money on based on your location – a feature that can quickly get awkward if you’re not at a takeout outlet and enter the amount of your receipt. I also understand pretty well where I am spending my money. I can enter “Bath Bed” instead of marking the exact bed I visited on the map and more.
I also appreciate the demand for self-determination. While some other apps are good at guessing which category your location-related expenses fall into, it seems like it’s best to categorize your expenses yourself.
(If you’re looking for an app that intuitively categorizes purchases for you based on your notes (and then lets you edit if needed), Dollarbird is the best one to understand that tacos should be in the Eating Out and Lampshade sections. should be divided into “Home appliances”).
Isn’t EveryDollar a budget app?
You would be right. Expense tracking is just one of the features of the EveryDollar app, and just one of many if you open your wallet to the paid version, which costs $ 129.99 a year. For example, the paid version allows you to import expenses directly from your bank account. But again, I say: you don’t need this.
EveryDollar allows you to set spending guidelines for categories when customizing your app. Or you can just add expenses as you go and summarize for the month. It can be disconcerting when you first use this method, because any amount spent in a category for which you have not set a budget cap will display the amount in red. Don’t worry about the color red if you’re just collecting data from scratch. You will still be able to see the percentage of each category in your total spending over time.
Once you know how much you spend in each category, you can set spending limits and take your tracking to the next level. But it’s up to you to decide.
At the end of your day of budgeting, the best expense counter is one you won’t forget to use and won’t be afraid to open up to enter your purchases. EveryDollar was the most intuitive app I’ve tested and earned it a lot of points in my book for that.