Looking for a simple budget app

April 17, 2024 10:42 AM

My wife and I are looking for an iOS app to keep track of our discretionary spending. All the budget apps that we’ve found so far are too feature-heavy and complex for our needs. We don’t need something that automatically tracks electronic purchases, categorizes them, makes suggestions or anything like that. Just something where when we spend money, we can quickly open up an app and be prompted to enter the amount and brief description and it’ll auto-add the date.

This doesn’t really even have to be strictly a “budgeting” app, just something that’ll prompt for the data I mentioned above and store it for us to look at later. Right now we’re working in a Google spreadsheet which is just not ideal for data entry on mobile while on the go. Appreciate any thoughts!

posted by saturday_morning to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

A Google Form that populates the spreadsheet might be ideal for this.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 10:53 AM on April 17

Pennies might be what you want? I use it sometimes for lightweight expense tracking. However, I don't know what its current export capabilities are.
posted by praemunire at 11:08 AM on April 17

I would recommend Splitwise. we use it for household expenses and how much we owe each other.
posted by alchemist at 11:33 AM on April 17

Memento database will let you easily build what you want
posted by Sophont at 1:28 PM on April 17

I use YNAB like that. Obviously it has a million other features, but I ignore them (I do not, in fact, need a budget).
posted by The corpse in the library at 3:34 PM on April 17

I recently started using Pear Budget, which I found via a comment here. It’s very streamlined, and intuitive to use. I run it on my iPad, and it’s super easy to add spending info.

It doesn’t really “prompt” me for data, but there are only three main pages/things you can do with it: plan your budget (1 page), enter receipts/spending (additional page), and review your spending (additional page).
The enter receipts page has 4 fields - select the date on a calendar pop out, enter the amount, select a category from a dropdown menu (autopopulates from your budget categories if you set that page up first, which I did), and an optional field to add notes or tags for the entry.
Message me if you want to see a screenshot of this page, or have other questions.

There is a 30 day free trial if you want to play around with it a bit. No login required for that, though I am not sure how it would work with multiple users... There’s a paid version as well, which requires a login.

Also fwiw, the comment that directed me to Pear mentioned that the creator is a Mefite, which feels like shopping local to me :)
posted by jolenex4 at 4:11 AM on April 18 [1 favorite]

Splitwise should work for that, even if you don't need to use the "split" functions.
posted by quadrilaterals at 6:27 AM on April 18