6 great money apps to help you seize control of your finances

Oliver Jones
20th October, 2016
Money & Finance

Modern money is hard to keep track of – bank accounts, credit cards, loans, savings… a lot of us have more than one of each. With the phenomenal growth of online finance, the days of paper statements are drawing to a close with the majority of people now opting to do all their financials over the web. Fortunately, the growth of online banking has been mirrored by the rise of the finance and money apps. There are now a large number of money assistants available to help make your life easier by offering a number of financial tools through one interface.

But which are the best and easiest if you regularly use your smartphone? Here we take a look at our top six:

Top 6 Money Apps

PiggyPot

This neat little saving app goes a long way to automating your savings and investments. The money app allows you to choose how much you want to save, set a date for it, decide whether to save monthly or weekly and then takes care of all of it. There are a huge number of different preset pots that you can save into including holiday funds, birthdays or Christmas. You can also set up your own bespoke pots and the app then shows you progress for each.

PiggyPot also allows you to take savings money out and spend it in its own shop for gift cards you can use on the high street or with Amazon.

OnTrees

Produced by moneysupermarket.com, OnTrees lets you see where your money is going and gives you a full breakdown of your spending on things like supermarket shopping, travel, utility bills or eating out. The money app works with most UK bank accounts, savings accounts and credit cards and all of these accounts are available through a single interface.

The great thing about OnTrees is its colourful representation of accounts, spending and categories giving you an instant picture of where you are with your money. While most functions that you need are available through the app, you can access more functions through the OnTrees website.

Wave

If you’re self-employed or run your own business, keeping track of business expenses and invoicing can be a nightmare. The Wave website is already used by a million small business owners but the two smartphone apps – Wave Invoice and Wave Receipts – take billing clients and scanning receipts out on the road. Invoice keeps track of your billing, reminding you and your clients when invoices are about to become overdue. The Receipts app allows you to scan a receipt and upload it and then Wave interprets the information on it – amount spent, category, merchant, etc.

Pariti

Like OnTrees, Pariti collates all of your accounts into a single app on your smartphone or tablet. The app automatically calculates your income, bills, credit card repayments and so on to show you how much disposable income you can safely spend each week. The app can be configured to look ahead and warn you when your payments are due and if you are likely to run out of money.

Pocket Expense

Pocket Expense – which describes itself as a ‘personal finance assistant’ – puts all of your financial accounts in one place and tracks your transactions, your bills and your repayments allowing you to set budgets for each and to work towards your savings goals. The app supports multiple budgets and allows you to see whether you might be better off postponing a purchase by forecasting how much disposable income you’ll have at a date in the future.

YNAB

YNAB – short for You Need A Budget – has been around for a while and has been regularly updated. The latest version gives you control over your finances by stopping you going overdrawn, helping you plan how to pay off your debts and tracks your transactions by giving you the facility to quickly enter them in the app before you’ve left a store. You can set budgets for different categories – groceries, eating out, travel, etc – and the app will tell you whether you have enough money in each category before you make a purchase. You can also link the app with your partner’s so that both of you know how much you have available to spend in each category. If one category is running low but another is flush with cash, you can quickly move money from one to another.

Topics :

apps , google , ios , money , windows

Oliver Jones

Oliver Jones has written for Solution Loans since 2015. His passion for personal finance comes through in the 150+ blog posts he's written since that time. His talent for explaining all things money means he's covered topics as diverse as...Read about Oliver Jones