Monefy – Hands On with the Popular Money Tracking App

If you’re interested in finding ways to save money (I’m going to take an uneducated guess and say that the vast majority of us are), the best place to start is to know where your money is going.

Tracking expenses can be difficult though, especially when you’re living the busy lifestyle of a millennial or a gen-x – you’re always on the run. And tracking expenses means you’d need to have a pen and a piece of paper with you at all times, writing down as you spend your hard-earned greens. On top of it all, you’d need to sit down at the end of every day (or at least week), draw the line and calculate your expenses.

Luckily we don’t need to carry a pen and a piece of paper with us as we now have smartphones. And I could give you at least a dozen better ways to spend your Sunday night.

Expense tracking apps have been around for as long as smartphones, but they never got the attention, or achieved the popularity they deserved. I never understood why until I tried Monefy (this even rhymes, hey!).

Monefy is Easy to Use

There are two things that need to be done properly in order for an expense tracking app to be successful, and Monefy nails both perfectly. Those are ease of use and the user interface/graphical representation.

If you’re tracking expenses, you’re typing down and logging pretty much every single time you take out your wallet, which probably happens a lot during the day. You won’t have the time to tap your screen ten times to get to where you want to be. Tracking needs to be simple and fast, and Monefy excels.

Once you start the app, you’ll be given a choice to enter your daily/weekly/monthly/yearly budget, with no more than three taps. After that, you’ll be shown a pie chart, surrounded by all the various categories you usually spend your money on: food, education, leisure, transport, etc. Tap on any of the categories and start logging in your expenses. That’s pretty much it. I really like the look of the app, with mild colors and simple icons, it does a great job at drawing your attention to what matters, and doesn’t offer a bunch of unimportant features.

One of the things I really liked seeing was the embedded calculator, which is a great add-on. It is really a pain in the neck when you need to jump out of the app and open up the standard stock calculator that comes with the device.

After tracking your expenses for some time, you’ll fill your pie chart with various percentages that update instantly, showing you where your money is going. Simple, effective, straight to the point.

It comes with all the standard features you’d expect from such an app – you have a budget mode allowing you to set up a monthly budget, you can choose your currency as well as which day your week starts with.

It doesn’t have a recurring income or expense option, or a reminder, but it does have a carryover mode, a useful but rarely seen option. It also allows your databases to be exported, and syncs with the Dropbox cloud. Keep in mind, this is the app’s free version – there’s also a paid version, costing $1.79, which offers the option to add more categories, as well as a passcode to lock the app.

Undo?

The app does have a few flaws. As I was playing around with it, I accidentally added a bunch of money to a category.

After I pressed “add”, I returned to the main screen, where a small “undo” button appeared, but just briefly. I didn’t press it on time, and it was over. The money was logged in with, as far as I could tell, no way of deleting it. If there is a way to remove specific expenses, then the devs have made an extra effort to hide it from sight. You should be careful when logging in expenses – add an extra zero by mistake, and the entire chart is gone to hell, destroying your money-saving efforts.

But if you’re not being half-cocked as the author of this review, you’ll enjoy using Monefy. It’s clean, simple and fast. The pie chart is a great feature which can instantly show you where you’re spending most of your money.

Together with the budget mode, carryover mode and the ability to add multiple accounts, these features make Monefy one of the best expense tracking apps out there.