Best Expense Tracker App

The post Best Expense Tracker App by Barbara Schmitt appeared first on Benzinga. Visit Benzinga to get more great content like this.

Looking for the best expense tracker app to manage your finances? Consider Empower.

Do you find yourself wondering where all the money goes? Does it seem to just slip through your fingers? If so, it may be time to get your finances under control. The best way to do that is to track your spending with an expense tracker app. These apps can help anyone, anywhere.

A good expense tracker app can help you manage your money so you can get out of debt and raise your credit score and get the best deals on interest rates, insurance and more. Take control of your cash flow, business expenses, receipt information, vendor payments and much more in one place.

Quick Look: Best Expense Tracker App

• Best for Unsubscribing: Clarity Money
• Best for Receipt Tracking: Wally
• Best for Building Savings: Oportun (formerly Digit)
• Best for Virtual Financial Assistance: Empower

4 Best Expense Tracker Apps

With numerous options available in the app market, finding the best expense tracker app can seem overwhelming. Check out Benzinga’s list of recommended apps to track your income and expenses.

1. Best for Unsubscribing: Clarity Money

Why we love it: It’s encouraging and champions your progress
Available on: iOS and Android

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a cheerleader that cheers you on when you meet a financial goal and gives you usable insights about your spending habits and makes your financial future a priority? Clarity Money, a financial management tool, does do that, and it’s totally free to use.

Clarity Money helps you take control of your finances and brings more transparency to your spending, giving you the whole picture all in one place, including your free credit score. The app tracks your spending and lets you know how much you’ve spent on, say, dinners out, compared with your goal for the month. Clarity Money also uncovers subscriptions that you don’t use as much as you thought you would, such as Netflix or Audible, and will cancel them for you.

2. Best for Receipt Tracking: Wally

Why we love it: Interesting features like currency conversion and family financial management tools
Available on: iOS (Wally) and Android (Wally+)

Wally is a personal finance app that comes in two free versions — Wally for iOS users and Wally+ for Android users. It was created by a small team of people who want to give you a complete picture of your money so you understand exactly what you have coming in, what you have going out, what you have budgeted for and what you have saved, in order to set and achieve your financial goals. Wally helps you keep track of the details of your spending.

Wally’s receipt tracking app feature allows users to add a photo of receipts with every expense you enter. The basic version of both versions is free, and the team plans to add upgrades in the future with features such as currency conversion for travelers or family management tools for users with children.

3. Best for Building Savings: Oportun (formerly Digit)

Why we love it: Focuses on building savings
Available on: iOS and Android

It’s amazing how fast you can achieve your savings goals when you use the Oportun app. Just decide what you want to budget for — your next vacation, a house down payment, paying off credit cards or student loans, or starting an emergency fund. Oportun will take it from there.

First, you’ll need to deposit your money in a Oportun account. Your money is held at FDIC-insured banks, protected up to $250,000, and 256-bit encryption keeps your data safe. Oportun will do the saving toward your specific goals and will take care of the payment for you once you’ve saved enough. You also get a bonus for saving with Oportun — 1% every three months.

4. Best for Virtual Financial Assistance: Empower

Why we love it: Acts as a virtual financial assistant
Available on: iOS and Android

Keeping track of expenses when you have several credit cards and different bank accounts can be difficult, especially if you’re not particularly skilled at number crunching. Enter the Empower expense tracker app.

Empower acts as your personal financial assistant. You can save money, build up your credit and get ahead, which empowers you to make smarter financial decisions about your money. Create a flexible budget with alerts, trackers, reports and helpful insights regarding your spending patterns. When you link your credit cards, checking account and savings account to Empower, you can see your balances, transactions, due dates and monthly payments anytime, anywhere. You don’t have to worry about security, either. Empower protects your account with advanced security measures.

What Expense Tracker Apps Do

An expense tracker app links all your accounts to your smartphone so you can use the app’s features to manage your finances, get out of debt, pay your bills, raise your credit score, save money and achieve your goals. However, you want to think outside of business expense tracking and look to what you can do to manage your money properly.

Bring Clarity to Your Spending Habits

One of the most important things an expense tracker does is give you insight into your spending habits. It lets you know how much money comes in and goes out, where and when you spend your money.

It also lets you know what you’re spending it on and why you’re making certain choices, especially ones that put your finances in the red. Once you see the whole picture, you can start making adjustments that will lead to a more secure financial future.

You can take the next step to track bills, scan paper receipts, review your budget plan, add expense categories and understand your account balances. If you can see where the money is going, these budgeting apps can take you beyond expense reports and spending trends to more efficient cash management.

Help You Create and Stick to a Budget

Armed with a new understanding of where your money is going and what kind of spending issues hold you back, you can create a budget and make choices about where and how you want to spend your money going forward.

Once you’ve set up a budget (you can do this easily with a budget app) an expense tracking app will help you monitor your spending with alerts to remind you of upcoming bill payments or to let you know when you’ve exceeded your limit in a spending category. This makes it easier to stay aware of your goals and stick to your budget.

You can set money goals for everyone on your team and ask them to stick to these spending budgets. Then, you can use the bill tracker to review payments you may to third parties, if needed. You can also complete a card reconciliation for each business credit account you carry, or you can do the same for your personal cards.

Reduce Your Debt and Raise Your Credit Score

The best expense tracker apps are designed to help you get out of debt and improve your credit score. FICO^® scores are used by 90% of top lenders to make billions of credit-related decisions every year.

Each FICO® score is based on information that three credit bureaus, Equifax, TransUnion and Experian, keep on file about you. A low credit score will result in higher interest rates on your credit cards and higher insurance payments. Heavy debt loads and not paying your bills on time also negatively affect your credit score. The sooner you can get out of debt, pay off your credit cards and consistently pay your bills on time, the sooner you will raise your credit score.

There are several expense tracker apps that can help you achieve your financial goals, from saving money for a new house or a vacation to getting out of debt or raising your credit score. Take an in-depth look at several that we like and choose the one that best meets your needs.

Features of a Great Expense Tracker App

The best expense tracker apps offer a list of features and functionality that help you manage your whole financial life in the palm of your hand, from the linking of your accounts to your smartphone to make sure your data is safe and protected. Here are some of the things to look for in order to get your finances back on track.

Keep All Your Money in One Place

All your money in one place and linked to your smartphone allows you 24/7 access to your credit card and bank account balances and transactions, due dates for bills, monthly payments and spending and saving goals so you can manage your money from wherever you happen to be.

You can act as your own bookkeeper, and as business owners you can see the cash flow. You can even track receipts for your accountant, generate a spending report for the team and get money management advice from these expense tracking apps. The more information you have, the more cost-effectively you can live or work.

Track and Curb Spending

Your transactions are synthesized into insights you can act on to stay on track with an expense tracker app. You get personalized tips and advice for maximizing your money. Alerts help you stay on top of your bills and credit score and let you know when you start to go over a set limit in a spending category.

Protect Your Financial Data

All the best expense tracker apps make the protection of your financial data a top priority. Using state-of-the-art security measures, like 256-bit SSL end-to-end encryption and multifactor authentication and Touch ID, they keep your accounts safe and secure.

Tracking Expenses Properly and Accurately

Finances are complex, and most people have a lot to manage with bank accounts, multiple credit cards, debts to pay down, savings to bulk up and credit scores to improve. Tracking your spending, keeping a budget and monitoring your spending throughout your life is the best way to give your finances a leg up.

Luckily, there are expense tracker apps that make the process easy, interesting and even fun.

Frequently Asked Questions

The post Best Expense Tracker App by Barbara Schmitt appeared first on Benzinga. Visit Benzinga to get more great content like this.