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T-Z Readers' Choice

The first step to financial literacy is to understand where your money goes.

Maria Dolgopolova

analyzed user experience

We've collected apps that our readers use to record spending and plan a budget. Choose.

Monefy

Price: 229 RUR for the full version.

A simple application that allows you to skip the setup step and start tracking your income and expenses immediately after installation. There are two buttons on the main screen - plus and minus - you need to click on one of them, enter the amount and select the desired category. To make your own list of categories and take into account money in different currencies, you need to buy a paid version. Bonus: all data can be protected with a password:

Max Gerasimenko

I bought a car and went on vacation

“I use Monefy Pro on my phone - it’s very simple, it launches quickly and the data is entered quickly. And on my computer in Excel I create a budget by category for each month. At the end of the month, I copy the data into a table and understand whether I am living within my means. In the past, with a good salary in a year, I didn’t save anything and didn’t really acquire anything, but this practice helped me a lot. I started keeping a budget - I bought a car, paid off a quarter of the mortgage, and went on vacation!”

YNAB

Price:$83.99 per year.

A service with its own budgeting methodology - the creators are confident that accounting for income and expenses should begin with planning. When receiving income, it must be entered into the program and distributed between categories that each user configures manually: how much of this money will go to food, how much to rent, and so on.

During the month, you need to enter expenses and, depending on the circumstances, change the budget, redistributing money between categories if some expenses turned out to be more than planned. To use the program, you must install the desktop version - you won’t be able to limit yourself to the mobile version. But in the program you can

stopped living paycheck to paycheck

“The main thing this program gives is the idea of ​​living not from paycheck to paycheck, but from the money earned last month. That is, if you follow the “YNAB method”, you automatically have an airbag for one month. Of course, all this long-term planning becomes a little more complicated taking into account inflation (and the authors of the program do not see this problem, since they themselves are from the USA).”

Cost Track

Price: 749 RUR for the full version.

The application allows you to maintain several budgets simultaneously. For example, create separate pages with expenses for weddings and renovations. Expenses for each month are displayed on a pie chart; you can see how much money was spent on each category as a whole or for a certain period. For each expense, you can add a comment, location, photo, and even an audio recording if you want to remember what exactly was purchased, but don’t have time to write:

Polygraph Sharikov

was ready to pay

“I chose the application for a long time, I was even ready to pay. It was important for me that the application was pleasant to look at, not confusing, and that it was possible to view expenses for different periods in different categories, as well as look at everything together on charts - so that it was visually clear where the most money was spent.

The first months I simply entered all expenses and looked at how much money was actually spent on what. It turned out that any little thing can add up to some fantastic sums of 100-200 RUR. I've been using the app for two years, and it still never ceases to amaze me. I like to meditate on the numbers for the year - I would never have thought that I would take 100,000 R each to the Pyaterochka in the neighboring house. And of course, it’s nice to see how much income is growing - for example, this year we managed to earn a serious amount of money on hack jobs.

Now that I know how much money I'm spending on, it allows me to plan my future budget - I do it separately, just in a spreadsheet. By the way, my budget is planned in more or less detail for a year in advance, and in broad strokes for about another three years. It turned out that planning for a year is very convenient - if you know how much I will earn in 12 months and how much of this money will be spent on everyday life, then it’s clear how many vacations you can afford and how many more large purchases you can plan.”

Visual Budget

Price: 529 RUR for the full version.

A detailed application that allows you to view data in a list, pie or line diagrams. Categories can be grouped: for example, take into account business lunches, takeaway coffee and home products separately, but combine them into the large “Food” category. To make it easier to deal with the intimidating interface, the developers added a Sample Account to the application - it looks as if you were logged into someone else’s account, but it’s clear how it works:

loves simplicity

“I tried many applications - I couldn’t find anything simpler or more convenient. The interface is simple, but it is very easy to record your income and expenses. You can see in advance how much money is left, how much is missing, and what needs to be reduced in another category. Just like in YNAB, all income needs to be budgeted, divided into categories. All regular expenses can be set up so that they are paid automatically.”

Personal Finance

Price:

An application that allows you to maintain not only a personal, but also a joint budget - there is a function “Analysis for each family member”. You can create an unlimited number of categories and subcategories and customize automatic download data from bank SMS. The application predicts the approximate budget for next month and the amount of savings:

Irina Potapova

enters daily expenses into the application

“I don’t pay anything to use the application, I really like it. It is possible to manage a family budget or an individual one. Categories: income, accounts, expenses (plan and actual). I don’t use the function of downloading bank SMS from my phone. Yes, and I don’t track the ruble - the balance can be adjusted. But yes, I make changes every day.”

Money Manager EX

Price: free, only for Android.

Free service with open source code, in the improvement of which anyone can take part. Thanks to teamwork, the service was translated into 30 languages ​​and an Android application was created. Here you can plan your budget for the month and year, set up automatic entry of regular expenses and make a list of your expense categories:

Markswebb Rank & Report, at the request of RBC Money, tested 11 of the most popular Russian-language applications for monitoring and planning a personal budget and selected the best

​The first step to saving money is to analyze your own spending, financial advisors say. The most convenient way to do this is with the help of PFM (Personal Financial Management) services, which automatically evaluate your expenses and present them in a form convenient for analysis. Russian PFM applications can be divided into two groups: banking applications built into online banks, and services from independent developers.

The problem with banking applications is that in most cases they analyze expenses on accounts and cards in a particular bank, while most Russians usually use the services of several credit institutions, and often spend cash. However, in some bank applications (for example, Sberbank, Alfa Bank and Russian Standard) you can manually enter expenses in cash.

Banking applications are essentially just an addition to online banks. Therefore, we decided to evaluate independent applications for controlling personal finances. They can be used by anyone without being tied to specific banks. At the request of RBC Quote, the Markswebb Rank & Report agency selected the most popular home accounting applications for the iOS and Android platforms and tested them. Web versions of services were not evaluated (see table for detailed methodology).

Manual control

The key disadvantage of independent mobile PFM services is the need to enter most of the data manually. For example, none of the application developers analyzed by Markswebb Rank & Report were able to properly recognize bank SMS messages about transactions. Domestic Easy Finance and Zen-Money went further than others.

Both programs allow you to import bank statements in several formats. True, entering this data is only possible in synchronization with mobile application web versions. Moreover, the RBC Quote correspondent on the Easy Finance website did not manage to do this correctly the first time.

And in order to set up automatic entry of transactions in the Zen Money application, you need to set up redirection emails bank about completed transactions to the e-mail provided by the developers of this project. Thus, you can automatically enter card transactions from, for example, Citibank, VTB24, and Bank St. Petersburg into the application. In total, the service offers synchronization of expense data in one way or another with eight banks.

The MoneyWiz and Money Pro applications developed in the West allow you to import bank statement data in the OFX (open financial exchange) format, which evolved from the financial exchange format. Microsoft data. It is quite popular among American and European banks, but is rarely found in Russia. Although, for example, Raiffeisenbank makes it possible to download account statements in three formats, including OFX.

"Zen Mani"

In other applications, you will have to create “accounts” corresponding to bank ones, into which you need to independently enter data on income and expenses. In some, you can take into account expenses and income in cash, bank cards, deposits and other financial products.

The most complete and convenient options for setting up accounts are offered by the Zen Money and Money Pro services, according to Markswebb Rank & Report. Other apps, such as Spender and Spendee, track all expenses without linking them to specific accounts. Such applications, according to Markswebb Rank & Report, will be convenient for those who primarily use cash and do not use bank cards.

All applications have a default list of expense categories, which can be edited by adding new categories and removing unnecessary ones. According to test results, Markswebb Rank & Report considers the most convenient applications for setting up categories and subcategories of expenses (for example, in the “Car” category - the ability to create new subcategories “Service”, “Gasoline”, “Insurance”, etc.) CoinKeeper, Home Budget, MoneyWiz and Money Pro.

CoinKeeper

MoneyWiz and Money Pro, among other things, allow you to divide the transaction amount into parts tied to different categories of expenses (for example, the amount spent in a supermarket can be divided into several categories). You can also add comments and photos to an expense transaction.

MoneyWiz

Cost Analysis

The most complete and convenient opportunities for visualization and analysis of collected expense data, according to Markswebb Rank & Report, are offered by the CoinKeeper and Spendee applications - in them you can see the distribution of expenses by category in the form pie chart, you can track the dynamics of expenses by month, by individual categories.

According to the possibilities of exporting expense data, Reserve copy and synchronizing data with other devices, the most functional applications are Home Budget, “My Money with Money” and MoneyWiz, according to Markswebb Rank & Report.

“In the end, we found five services to be the most convenient and visually attractive,” says Alexey Skobelev, CEO of Markswebb Rank & Report. Here they are:

— Spendee Suitable for students and those who practically do not use banking services.

— “Zen Money” and CoinKeeper— attractive and convenient applications for simple expense tracking. Suitable for those who use cash and several bank cards at the same time.

— MoneyWiz and Money Pro- complex applications with big amount settings. Suitable for those for whom a variety of functions is more important than convenience.

In addition to analyzing expenses, applications often ask you to set certain goals - to save the necessary amount of money, for example, for a car, or to create a financial “cushion” for six months. Application developers (in this case Easy Finance) have fully internalized the advice of financial advisors. This one - about the need to have enough money for six months of comfortable existence just in case - is one of the most favorite.

As well as advice to monitor your expenses. CEO Personal Advisor Natalya Smirnova says she asks her clients to provide income and expense reports two to four times a year to track their financial health. But to achieve long-term goals, she creates an individual plan.

Money Pro

PFM services are a useful tool for analyzing and minimizing daily expenses, but they are not enough to save for long-term financial goals, agrees Anton Graborov, director of customer service for the BCS financial group. “You need to not only save, but also understand how to properly invest the accumulated funds. This question is answered by personal financial planning, which analyzes a person’s individual financial situation,” he says.

So far, PFM services are not very popular among Russians. According to Algirdas Shakmanas, managing director for e-business at Promsvyazbank, the bank’s planning service personal budget “Smart Money” is connected by every fifth Internet banking user. The “My Expenses” service, which has become accessible to users Internet bank "Alfa-Click" in December 2013, 12% of clients use it monthly, says Yuri, head of the development and innovation department of the Internet bank of Alfa-Bank Chernyshev.

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To protect yourself from big expenses and save up for a small house somewhere on the seashore, you don’t have to deny yourself everything and tightly sew your savings into a mattress. Sometimes it's enough to just use personal assistants, which fit into regular smartphone. website collected 10 applications for saving, counting and increasing your income.

Zen mani

A convenient tool for budget planning with recognition of SMS from all the largest banks in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and automatic creation of transactions. You can work on several devices - the data will be automatically synchronized. In addition, the program analyzes costs and makes forecasts. It's quite easy to understand here.

CoinKeeper

Very convenient for quickly recording expenses directly at the checkout. The main screen of the application looks like a large coin holder. Income, wallets and expenses are presented as stacks. To record a waste, just move a coin from one stack to another. In addition, the application analyzes income and expenses for different periods, helps make forecasts and has many other useful functions.

Rubbishmoney

The application has 4 laconic directories: expenses, income, movements and exchange. You can make a shopping list and then audit it: what was bought, what was not, how much was spent. The application allows you to create both short-term and long-term budgets. You can plan to buy, say, a sofa, and the “Drebemoney” will diligently count how much is left to save. The application has a multi-user mode - you can connect all family members to the system and monitor the overall budget.

Spendee

The application has fairly minimalist functionality, so adding a purchase to the database will take no more than a couple of seconds. Those who are strong in spirit can take a look at the expense statistics section. After this, many are guaranteed to begin to refrain from unnecessary little things that they usually grabbed from display cases without thinking.

Toshl is quite similar in functionality to Spendee and, rather, is its eye-pleasing alternative, since you will be keeping track of expenses under the supervision of cute cartoons of Asian origin. The downside: you can’t specify multiple accounts, but you can separate them with tags.

Daily Budget

If you want to start saving money for something more meaningful than lunch, this app will help you take control and calculate your daily expenses. First, you need to enter your monthly income, indicate the amount of standard monthly expenses (for example, utility bills) and indicate the percentage of your total income that you want to put into the piggy bank. After a little thought, the application will give you an amount that you can safely spend during the day.

HomeMoney

A convenient and widely appreciated application for home accounting. Allows you to record expenses, income, transfers from account to account, and evaluate account balances. It is possible to view the entered information in the form of graphs - and it immediately becomes clear where the holes are in the budget.

M8 - my money. My way

Maintaining home accounting is a guarantee of maintaining wealth in families. Users can control their finances both the old fashioned way, that is, in notebooks, and in modern ways, by installing appropriate applications on computers. This review will select best program to account for income and expenses.

HomeBank

A free utility that allows you to do home accounting. With this, the user can control the family budget, analyze expenses, etc. The application allows you to import data from the Quicken service and utilities for managing personal funds. The program for accounting income and expenses works with QIF, QFX, CSV and OFX formats.

Incoming transactions are automatically added to the database. The user can enter tags and edit several lines at the same time. This will speed up the work and simplify the settlement process. The application allows you to create an annual or monthly plan for each category, as well as generate dynamic reporting that reflects your current financial situation. For clarity, diagrams are added to the text.

"Family Budget Lite"

In order to get started with this program, you just need to indicate your income and expenses in the appropriate columns. All operations are performed in automatic mode. Data is reported in several main categories. In the program, you can keep monthly records of loans, deposits, etc. When specifying the names of goods, the application automatically selects the required category from the list.

To create a detailed report, you need to make 1 click with the computer mouse. The program works with HTML formats, BMP, TXT, as well as MS Word and Excel. If necessary, you can print and save the document. Each user who wants to work with the utility needs to register. The password can be set when starting the program.

Searching for invoices is very convenient. The user can customize the issue using several filters: “product”, “date”, etc.

"Family Accounting"

The utility allows you to analyze and control income. The user will learn to plan expenses and think through a budget. He will no longer have to remember where the funds set aside for an important purchase went. The program allows you to keep track of revenue and debts in various currencies and analyze financial transactions.

The user can not only work in the application independently, but also provide access to other people. Each participant in the system will have their own credentials. The program for recording income and expenses creates archival copies of the database, which are saved for later restoration or export to Excel.

CashFly

This is a simple and very user-friendly utility. The PC owner can create visual, multi-level structures and complex graphs that display input data and other important financial information. Here the user will find an address book, a list of companies and a personal diary.

The organizer allows you to save notes about important events. The utility was created to keep track of income in any currency, carry out planned operations and print information. To restrict access to the database, the user must set a password.

"Home Accounting Lite"

This utility is designed for daily accounting of incoming funds. The user can systematize personal and family expenses. The application will also appeal to owners of small firms and enterprises. The interface of the program for accounting income and expenses of individual entrepreneurs is simple and understandable. To work with the utility, it is not necessary to have special knowledge in the field of accounting.

The user can take into account income, expenses and other transactions. There is no limit on the number of accounts in the program. The user can choose a currency, adjust the interface to suit their own needs, and look for answers to questions in a special help system. To start working with the application, you must enter your username and password.

AbilityCash

Using this application, you can keep financial records both at home and in an organization. The user has access to a large number of options. At the same time, the demon paid program accounting for expenses and income does not take up much space on your PC. The utility's interface is quite simple. Thanks to this, the application can be used without special knowledge and skills.

The program allows you to adapt any function. The user can keep separate records for each item of personal expenses. He does not have to enter data into the proposed category. Accounting for incoming funds is carried out in any currency.

Using this utility, you can create a plan for cash receipts and expenses for any period. The program helps you accumulate the required amount of money within a specified time frame.

Personal Finances

Another convenient application For driving in cash. The developers invite users to download trial version income and expense accounting programs for free or purchase a license. The utility has user-friendly interface. Using the demo base, you can master the program in a short time. The application allows you to control the expenses of all family members, track bank deposits and loan payments, and plan a budget in different currencies.

The user can transfer money from one account to another, view a list of debts, and create reports on selected categories. The utility was created for operating systems Windows systems and iOS. The application can also be launched from a USB drive.

Family Pro 11

This is another paid program for tracking income and expenses for the home. The developers offer PC owners to download a trial version of the utility. This is necessary so that the user has the opportunity to explore all the options and understand whether he will purchase a license. The interface is convenient and clear. The application can be mastered in a few hours.

A program for tracking income and expenses allows you to track loan payments, create goals, and plan a family budget. The user can save reports for a specified period and synchronize with other devices. The disadvantages of the utility include the lack of an option to add categories.

Keeping a book of income and expenses in the program is very convenient. To store data, just install the utility. After this, the PC owner can begin to make calculations, while simultaneously systematizing income and other financial transactions.

conclusions

Users who want to work with a full-featured utility will appreciate the HomeBank and CashFly applications. The Family Pro 11 program will be chosen by people who know how to succinctly manage a family budget.

"Where's the money"

A financial diary from Russian developers that allows you to track your expenses. You can create categories - for example, "Transport", "Eating out", "Auto" - and systematically record the amount spent for each of them in the application. After a while, you get a clear and quite indicative breakdown of expenses, looking at which you can draw conclusions about your financial behavior. The basic functionality of the application is free, but a significant part of the interesting functions is available only in the paid version: automatic addition of expenses from SMS, shared wallets, debt control, etc. strengths The application has a simple interface and attractive design.

Splittable

Helps accurately divide expenses when spending together - renting a home, organizing a party or traveling. All you need to do is add all participants to the application, indicate who spent how much, and Splittable will calculate how to pay each other fairly. First of all, the service is aimed at those who rent an apartment together: during the month, everyone contributes their expenses - from paying bills to buying paper towels, and at the end the application will tell you about mutual debts. Splittable makes long nervous evenings of trying to remember how it was and long calculations on pieces of paper a thing of the past.

Money Lover

A mobile service for monitoring expenses and income, which is also available in the desktop version. The user enters the categories of his spending and synchronizes the application with his bank account, after which all that remains is to enter information about cash purchases. Money Lover can also read receipts and automatically categorize purchases. Cost statistics can be tracked using detailed graphs and charts. It is possible to set a money limit for a day or a week. This feature will alert the user if expenses are approaching the acceptable limit. In addition, when traveling, the application will easily convert purchases in local money into the main currency of the application and also distribute them into categories.

Smart Receipts

Scan receipts using your smartphone's camera and automatically organize purchase information into categories. Based on it, the application generates reports in text format, which can be quite detailed. Smart Receipts will help those who constantly report for business trips and at the same time do not really like collecting stacks of receipts. The creators of the application say that it will be convenient for employees of any accounting department and for those who are interested in the most detailed information about your spending.

WiseCards

A bank card tracker that combines them all under one icon. Linking cards is not required; the service works based on the analysis of SMS and data on tariffs of Russian banks. When entering information about a credit card, WiseCards will add the dates and amounts of mandatory payments to the calendar and will promptly remind you about them. The service stores information about all transactions on added cards (both credit and debit), as well as a catalog of discounts available on them. In addition, the application can tell you which credit card is more profitable to make a purchase for a certain amount.

Friends Money

A service that helps you borrow money from friends from social networks. The user must log into the application via VKontakte, Facebook or Twitter and link to the account bank card. After this, you will be able to place an offer or request to borrow money. You can only negotiate with your friends on social networks, and borrow no more than 15 thousand rubles. In this case, the details of the loan - term, remuneration, penalties, etc. - are determined by the parties themselves. Friends Money commission is 1.5% of the transfer amount for each transaction plus 20 obligatory rubles. The most slippery point is that the application does not bear any responsibility for returning money. The implication is that in the era of social networks, reputation is worth more than several thousand rubles, and “being bad” is simply unprofitable.

I Owe You

A minimalist application for remembering who borrowed what, from whom, and when it’s time to repay the debt. The application's only button creates new cells where information about the borrowed item or amount, return deadline and reminder date are added. You can link the debtor’s contacts to the loan so that the application can send him an SMS or email reminder without hesitation. You can set periodic alerts, which will help, for example, those who systematically force the rent payment date out of their memory.

Unfortunately, most of the best applications for personal finance are not localized in Russia, so users in our country do not have access to all their capabilities. But they are worthy of mention - perhaps they will be adapted someday. For example, an application that, in essence, is a messenger like WhatsApp, but allows you to transfer a small amount to another user of the service without a commission - for example, when you split the bill for dinner together. There is also the functionality of a chatbot, which in dialogue mode will give reasoned advice on how to quickly reach your financial goal, or show a schedule of expenses for Lately. The service monitors the user’s expenses for a couple of days, and then begins to quietly deposit small amounts into a savings account. And the veteran and leader of many ratings of applications for accounting for personal finances can aggregate almost all possible personal financial information - from graphs of expenses for sunflower oil to indicators of the status of investments and cryptocurrency rates.