Although tedious, tracking your expenses is important to managing your finances right. Using pen and paper or an Excel sheet to jot down your daily spending seems like a dreadful task.
Fortunately, there are dozens of expense tracking apps that make the process a lot easier. These apps provide you with useful finance templates and categories, so you can start adding your expenses right away.
We have picked some of the best apps for Android that allow you to track your expenses, be it manually or automatically.
1. Ivy Wallet
Ivy Wallet defies the stereotype that most information-heavy apps have to look cluttered and ugly. It strikes a great balance between big, bold icons and data that you might need at a glance.
You can add multiple accounts, including ones for cash and crypto. The preset categories come in handy for organizing your expenses and you can always create your own. Planned payments make it easier to track expenses such as recurring subscriptions to services like Netflix or Spotify.
Although Ivy Wallet primarily specializes as a manual expense tracker, you can set budgets for various categories to make sure you don't overspend. The app also has beautiful report graphs and a calendar view that lets you focus on a bigger picture of your expenditure.
An area where Ivy Wallet shines bright is in managing different types of currencies, including over 20 popular cryptocurrencies.
All in all, the extremely simple UI and lack of any distracting elements make Ivy Wallet a great expense tracking app for absolute beginners. You can even choose to store all your expenditure data locally for added privacy.
Download: Ivy Wallet (Free, in-app purchases available)
2. Money Manager
Money Manager by Realbyte Inc. brings a slightly more traditional approach to managing your expenses. This app goes for an Excel sheet kind of an approach when it comes to listing and displaying your expenditure. This makes it a great alternative for those who track expenses using Google Sheets or Excel.
That said, the app isn't too complicated to use. You can create categories, add accounts, and even transfer money between them. The bookmark feature lets you keep a tab on your most frequent transactions and keeps them only a tap away.
We found Money Manager to be one of the most detailed expense tracking apps around. Other features like being able to add a passcode, exporting your data in an Excel sheet, and access to a built-in calculator while adding expenses make this one of the more powerful apps on this list.
Download: Money Manager (Free, in-app purchases available)
3. Money Lover
Money Lover is another beautiful app that assists you with your expense tracking. Although its feature set is quite extensive, with budget planning, currency exchange, interest calculation, and more, we still found it to be a great app to manually add and manage expenses.
You can also connect your bank account and allow the app to auto-detect transactions using the SMS app. As powerful as it is, we enjoyed the colorful icons and graphs that Money Lover uses. You can also add a simple widget to your home screen that displays your account balance.
With over five million downloads on the Play Store, Money Lover also doubles as one of the best budgeting apps to help you with your finances.
Download: Money Lover (Free, in-app purchases available)
4. Spendee
Spendee comes in handy when you need a to-the-point expense tracking solution. It's also one of the few apps we've tried that has a true AMOLED dark mode. Couple that with the colorful category icons and you have yourself a visual treat.
When it comes to features, Spendee has it all sorted. You can manually track your expenses in varying categories, set budget limits, and view detailed reports of your spending. Thanks to the growing buzz around crypto and NFTs, Spendee lets you add specific wallets for those accounts too.
The premium subscription upgrades you to unlimited wallets and budgets and adds support for automatic bank account sync.
Download: Spendee (Free, in-app purchases available)
5. Wallet
Wallet uses an incredibly simple name to fulfill a very simple purpose. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of other apps, and it doesn't need them. You just install the app, sign up using your Google account, and start tracking your expenses.
Unlike most other financing apps, Wallet has only the most essential information displayed on its dashboard. Most of the day-to-day interaction within the app can be done in less than two swipes and a few taps.
Once you have your accounts set up, you can enable the categories that you frequently use, and have the rest tucked away. Wallet also has a section where you can add savings goals and another tab where you can set budgets to avoid overspending on things. The fact that it offers an ad-free experience is the cherry on top.
Download: Wallet (Free, in-app purchases available)
6. Fortune City
Fortune City might be the one app that could very well change your financial habits. It gamifies the entire process of tracking your expenses and managing your finances, turning a rather boring process into something you start enjoying.
Every time you add an expense in the app, you expand your city. There are over 100 different types of building that you can discover. We genuinely like this approach because the app pushes you to track even the tiniest bit of your expenses which is a sure-shot way to improve your budgeting skills.
Fortune City has both the upsides and downsides of an app disguised as a game. While it is extremely fun and interesting to use, it does sometimes add extra steps that end up distracting you. Although the game's mascot "Cashy" does a decent job at explaining how everything works, we wouldn't recommend this app to someone who wants a minimal and quick experience.
Download: Fortune City (Free, in-app purchases available)
Stay on Top of Your Expenses
With a proper expense tracking app, you should be on your way to managing your expenditure even more efficiently now.
Although this list catered to those who wanted a simple expense tracking solution, most of these apps go above and beyond and help you set budgets and manage your finances. Introducing the habit of routinely logging in your expenses and using other finance apps is a great way to improve your overall financial situation.