Penny Keeps Track of Your Expenses and Helps You Allocate Your Budget
There are many budgeting tools like Mint to help you track every penny and analyze your spending in a variety of ways. But if you’re new to budgeting or just want to keep things simple, it’s a good idea to have a basic understanding of your habits. Penny’s easy-to-read interface can help with this.
It works like a text application. The character “Penny” will guide you through the entire process. First, you set up your accounts. Unfortunately, it is currently limited to a few banks and credit card issuers, but the main ones (Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and many more) are covered. Once you link your account, the app will give you a simplified view of what your spending looks like.
It breaks everything down into five main categories: food, transportation, bills, income, and other purchases. You can always view your spending in these categories, but instead of researching trends yourself, you have several options to choose from in the text messaging interface:
- How are you [current month]?
- Activity in my account
- Breakdown by category
Let’s say you chose a breakdown by category . Penny will respond with a simplified chart of your total expenses in each category for the past thirty days. She will then compare each category monthly.
This is not the best tool for delving deeply into your budget. For example, with Mint, you can view specific tags and expense subcategories yourself. This app will guide you through the process, but if you are new to budgeting it might be helpful.
You will need your bank login to use the app, of course, but they do not store your credentials. Through their privacy policy:
While we collect credentials to log into your bank accounts, we never store your credentials anywhere in our system – we use them to connect to your bank account and then forget them. In addition to your personal information, we also track and store your use of the internal analytics app. Finally, we store transaction and balance information collected from your bank account. We only collect information when we believe it will actually help you . We prefer not to know more about you if we don’t have to, because that also makes our life easier! We protect the personal information you provide to us using industry standard security methods such as encryption, firewalls, and access controls. We take security very seriously and have defended financial systems in our past professional positions.
You can read their full policy here and check out the app yourself at the link below.
Penny | Apple Store
Penny | Google play store