It can often be difficult to keep up with all of your purchases and really see where your money is going each week. Even if you take time to balance your bank account, you’ll often not notice where small amounts of money are going to coffee, apps, and more.
Expenditure is an app that aims to help alleviate this problem by making it simple to record all of your cash flows on the go. Whether you make money from selling some used books or spend $5 on lunch, you can keep track of where your money’s going. Let’s dive in and see if this app is what your budget needs to keep you on track.
Getting Started
Expenditure makes it easy to get started with an informative Getting Started guide that opens when you first run the app. Step through the quick tutorial to see how to use each of the major features, or press the x button in the corner to close the tutorial and get started entering your expenses.
Get started quickly with the informative intro guide
If you’ve held off on getting an app to keep track of finances for fear that it would be too complex, you’ll be pleased to see that Expenditure is very simple to use. The main screen on the left shows your current balance with expenses from top categories listed underneath. There’s not much to see yet since we haven’t added any transactions, so tap the New Transaction button here to get started. Now just enter the amount you spent, or if you’re recording an income, tap the green Income button to make it a positive amount of money. Press Ok when you’re finished.
Enter new transactions quickly
Your new transaction will now be ready for your to add extra information. Expenditure lets you categorize your expenses; if you can’t find a category that sounds correct for your expense, scroll down to the bottom of the list to add a new one. You can also add a photo of your purchase and enter a note so you can quickly remember what you bought. Alternately, if you’re in a hurry, just press Save transaction and you can add more info later.
Categorize expenses and add a note or image to make it easy to remember
Keep up With Your Transactions
Now that you’ve added an expense, you’ll see a negative value on your home screen, along with the expense listed under the top categories. As you add more expenses and payments over time, you’ll see a better picture of where your money’s going. Tab the button under the top amount to switch between Top categories, Top months, and Recent transactions.
See all your transactions in a glance
Tap a category name to open all expenses in that category. These will be displayed by month, with the total amount for the category listed on the bottom. Select a transaction to see more info about it in a picture-perfect receipt.
Look back at your transactions
The transaction screen lets you see all the info you’ve added to a note. Just swipe left over the receipt to see any notes or photos you added to a transaction, and you can edit any of the information as you need. Or, if you’ve made a mistake and want to remove a transaction, just pull down on the receipt to delete it. This app makes great use of a photo-realistic environment to make it easy and delightful to use with little touches like this.
See all of a transaction's details, or pull the receipt down to delete it
Adding Special Transactions
All of your daily transactions won’t be static Dollar or Euro amounts. Sometimes you may want to add a repeating expense, such as a mobile phone charge, or you may need to add an expense in a foreign currency. Expenditure makes it easy to keep up with all of these types of transactions.
When you need to add an expense in a foreign currency, press the double arrow button on the top right of the input screen. Select the currency you need from the list, and Expenditure will then show the expense in the new currency with the conversion into your native currency underneath. You can update your exchange rates online from the settings page so you’ll always see the correct conversions. Then, you can add a repeating charge right from an expense’s overview page; just press the Not Repeating button, and select how often the charge should be repeated.
Expenditure works great with international transactions
Importing and Exporting Data
One problem with many iOS apps is that they’re often not designed to share data with your desktop applications or other apps on your device. Expenditure, however, makes it easy to move your financial data to any app you need. From the settings page, just press the Export transactions button. Select any transactions you wish to export, or tap Select all on the top, then press Attach to mail. This will let you email yourself a .csv formatted copy of your transactions, as well as an .exptr file that you can use to import data directly back into Expenditure.
Export all of your data and change your settings easily
You can then open the CSV file in any standard spreadsheet app, or even import it into your favorite desktop finance tool such as Quicken. Or, if you need to re-import your financial data into Expenditure, select the .exptr file and open it in Expenditure. This will import all of your transactions, including images, notes, and categories you may have added. With these options, you’ll be sure to never lose the financial data you’ve put into Expenditure.
Open your CSV formatted data in any spreadsheet, or import transactions to Expenditure
Conclusion
We were very impressed with Expenditure’s polish and strong feature set. It manages to handle a wide variety of transactions while still remaining very simple to use. The only problem we experienced were occasional crashes when adding a photo to a transaction; otherwise, Expenditure worked great. Plus, since you can always export your financial data, you don’t feel trapped with your data stuck in one app. The only thing more we could want would be a Mac and PC program that made it this easy to manage our expenses!