Tracking your expenses properly is really important for a business to sustain, even for individuals who want to find out how much money is going out of their pocket. Since I started working, one of the most difficult things for me was to keep track of how much money I spend every month. As I prefer to manage all my expenses and incomes myself, I also on a lookout for best apps that can help me make this task easier and less hectic.
I’ve tried many apps, but none ever hit the spot for me until I came across CashBase.
What Is CashBase?
CashBase is an app to keep track of all your expenses and incomes from a single and easy to use dashboard. You can manage all your expenses sorted by categories such as food, transportation, miscellaneous expenses, and more. You can also enter the amount of money you earn during the month and generate reports at the end of the month to find out how much you have saved during the month after all the expenses.
The service has dedicated iPhone and Android apps to help you track expenses on the go. The app requires you to login with your credentials so that the data you enter can be accessed from anywhere by logging in to your account from the web as well.
The service offers a free plan with limited features, but if you are satisfied with the service, you can sign up for a pro account as well that allows users to create budgets and cash flows for better cash management.
Tracking Income and Expenses
To get started, you must sign up for an account on CashBase which hardly takes a minute. After registration, you will be redirected to CashBase dashboard from where you can add expenses, incomes and manage reports. To add expenses, just click on the Expenses button from the main dashboard, enter the amount and category to which it belongs. If you want, you can add categories manually as well either from CashBase dashboard. After you add the income, you will also be shown the amount of money you have left. If you want, you can also add recurring expenses every month so that you don’t have to do it yourself every time.
Add expenses and incomes from simple and easy to use dashboard.
You can add as many wallets you want such as Cash wallet, debit cards, saving accounts, and more. To add any wallet, just click on the wheel icon and go to Wallets. From there you can add and manage as many accounts as you want, just make sure you compare it with your bank statements to be sure CashBase and your bank they reconcile with each other.
Transfer Money from One Wallet to Another
As they say, an image is worth a thousand words. If you want, you can view the breakup of all your expenses in the form of a pie chart as well. It will tell you how much money you have spent on different things. The service even allows you to print the chart or save it as an image file on your computer as well.
CashBase displaying all the expenses in a form of chart sorted by categories
The service also allows its users to generate custom reports as well. Just select the dates from the main dashboard and it will display all the incurred expenses and incomes from that time period.
Generating custom reports
Import/Export Data for Offline Use
One of the most important feature is the ability to export all your data in a CSV or ODS (open document format). Just click on export button and it will save the monthly report in your selected format. If you want, you can even import your bank statements as well as manage them automatically.
Import / Export CashBase data for offline use
Mobile Apps and Expense Management
The service has dedicated mobile apps for Android and iPhone as well which are available free of cost. You can just login and start adding your incomes and expenses from your device which will be synced with the online service. The mobile app also shows you the stats as well in a form of a chart, showing you the expenses and incomes separately.
CashBase iPhone dashboard
Cash Flow Projections and Budget Management
One of the best ways to make sure you save enough money each month is to create strict budgets. But you cannot manage them properly if you don’t know how much money you have earned/spent during the month. With CashBase, you can create budgets and make sure you don’t go over it. Apart from that, it also gives users 12 month cash flow projections to find out how much cash they have generated over the past one year. However, these two features are not present in the free version.
Wrapping it Up
There are a lot of expense tracking apps available on the internet, but majority of them aren’t free and the ones which are free may not have that much to offer to its users. Other than that, apps like Mint.com are not available in every part of the world, so people like me have to look for alternatives which are useful and easy to operate.
For me, CashBase is that app. It is a simple and easy to use expense tracking tool. The tool offers users with some very attractive features in order to efficiently manage their accounts, expenses and savings.
One feature that I think that should be in the app is to select multiple currencies. By default, the app does not show any currency sign after you start adding transactions, which is not a big issue, but is one thing I’d like to see changed going forward.
Which expense tracking app do you use and why? Did you try CashBase? We’d love to hear about your thoughts in the comments below!