

The app works for two linked accounts, but there’s a one-time charge of $9.99 for up to 10 accounts.
#Best personal finance software 2014 android
The app, which is available for the iPhone and will serve Android in February, also searches the Web for coupons that you are most likely to use based on your past spending. The company is also working on letting users add cash transactions, alerts when users are close to incurring an overdraft fee, and other analytics. “It will be looking out for you almost like the perfect accountant in the background, letting you live your life and when you go beyond a certain threshold it will let you know,” said Yaron Samid, founder and chief executive. Those features and customizable alerts will be added in coming months. You can compare spending across all accounts with the prior month, but the app doesn’t provide insights into spending relative to income. You can compare spending across all accounts with the previous month. The analytics are informative, but one-dimensional. It did a relatively good job with the two cards I connected. Every time you swipe a card, the transaction is automatically categorized. The spending feature gives you a snapshot of your monthly spending, though you need be a heavy credit and debit card user for the numbers to have meaning. But last summer, it added a spending analytics tool and personalized savings alerts. You can’t add in your cash transactions and the app won’t work as well for people with inconsistent income and expenses, but the company is working on adding features that will address those issues.īILLGUARD This app started life as a security service that scanned users’ credit and debit charges for potentially erroneous or unauthorized transactions - a service Target shoppers can surely appreciate now. “What we wanted wasn’t a budget, but the digital equivalent of opening up your wallet and seeing how much you have left,” said Jake Fuentes, 27, Level’s co-founder and chief executive. If you had a day of heavy spending, it will show that you have less to spend for the remainder of the month. The app is connected to all of your credit, debit and banking accounts, so it knows every time you make a transaction and adjusts the money meter accordingly.

The money remaining is what you can spend, and the app breaks that down on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. The app is available for iPhone and is coming soon for Android. Instead, it acts as a spending meter or a gas gauge: On the first of each month, it fills up with your estimated income based on your previous history from that, the app automatically subtracts your recurring bills and a saving rate. LEVEL MONEY Less than three months old, this app is intentionally simple: You can’t create fancy charts that categorize every last dollar, nor does it wag a virtual finger to alert you when you’ve spent too much on restaurants in the last month. I’ve also listed a couple of more traditional, and more labor-intensive, options. To analyze your spending, they need to collect and then ferry data about your income and transactional history into their programs many rely on established players like Yodlee and Intuit for that plumbing and do not have the ability to move your money. I spent the last week testing several cash management tools, including the newest apps targeting younger generations as well as improvements made by established services like that still dominate the market.Ī note of caution: To use most of these apps and services, which promise bank-level security, you need to be comfortable entrusting them with the passwords to your financial accounts. “My favorite technology is the automatic transfer, so you don’t see the money in your account.” “Look for structural solutions or things that change your environment so you don’t need to be constantly vigilant,” said Stephen Wendel, a behavioral social scientist at HelloWallet, which helps employers provide financial guidance to their workers. But this is the time of year when many people try to get a grip on their spending. Behavioral scientists will tell you what you intuitively know: Willpower alone will take you only so far, and restrictive budgets eventually fail. All of this means that consumers need to work a bit harder to “feel” what they’re spending - and keep track of it. And once we can pay more easily with our smartphones, consumers will experience yet another degree of separation. Services like Amazon Prime, iTunes and others have separated us from our cards. Spending is painless.Ĭredit cards have separated us from our cash. There’s something brilliant, but also insidious, about services like Amazon Prime, where you don’t have to reach for your credit card to pay.
