Spending Tracker 2.7

I sometimes wonder how much I get to spend on different things. It's not that I carelessly throw money out the window (except for the occasional Kickstarter project). Still, having a libertine budget policy makes saving money difficult and keeping tabs on your spending habits nearly impossible. Knowing that there must be a digital solution to every first world problem, I scoured the Play Store for a suitable application. After trying a few apps and deciding what my requirements were, I settled with a free, good looking and simple app.

Accounting for dummies

Spending Tracker is a tool for tracking income and expenses. It can compare cash flow against a set budget and generate graphical representations on a week, month or year basis. The only requirement is for you to be responsible enough to record your expenses religiously. The app comes with a set of expense and income categories. Every entry must belong to a category. You can create a new category on the spot if you need to, but otherwise new categories can be inserted into the list, complete with their own icon and color. Details of a transaction include the amount (duh), notes and whether it gets repeated or not. In case of recurring transactions such as salary or subscriptions this can be set to repeat every so often.

Budgeting is not a default option though. Spending Tracker does its job just fine with a recurring income instead of a budget. If you still want to allocate part of your income to different things, you can create separate accounts and then add your preferred recurring income to each. Accounts support carry over, so you can easily keep track of your finances without having to update account credit manually.

There are three data screens that will eventually give you an accurate budget picture. Spending shows you a total sum of expenses for each category along with a pie chart for a clear representation. The Transactions screen is a list of every expense and income entry sorted by date. Here you can edit or delete existing entries. Finally, Reports shows you a graph of spending versus income over a selected time period. This is the slowest feedback screen but once you have several weeks of data you will begin to see a clearer picture.

While it is pretty much an enclosed environment, Spending Tracker can communicate with the outside world. Transactions can be exported as a "csv" file and can also be backed up or synced with Dropbox.

Features:

• Expense and income categories
• Accounts & Transfer
• Budget setting
• Graphical representations
• Backup and export

Pros:

• Easy to use with no over-complications
• Can be used either to monitor accounts or to track a set budget (or both)

Cons:

• App loads up a bit too slow.

Conclusion

Spending Tracker is one the best solutions for budget tracking that I have ever come across. There isn't to say that it cannot be improved further, but that is mainly in terms of accessibility and not features. It ain't broken, so don't fix it.