Managing money can be a thankless and tedious task. But thankfully, these days, there’s an app to make almost every part of your financial torments quite a bit easier. There are apps to help with budgeting, investment, managing expenses, your pension, savings, paying bills and much more.
Many of the top finance apps use ‘Open Banking’. This is a system that was brought in 2 years ago to require banks to share your financial information with other authorised providers if you give your express permission. Those providers all still have to abide by data protection rules. Open Banking has led to a lot of innovation in financial management products. Here are a few of the best money management apps available today.
Savings
Snoop is a free app that helps you to find savings in your usual spending. It literally ‘snoops’ on your usual spending patterns and makes suggestions. For example, it will tell you when voucher codes and sales are available for your favourite outlets. It will tell you the best time to renew your insurances and tell you when it looks like you are paying over the odds for monthly bills and utilities.
Expenses
As it suggests, Expensify is a great app for keeping track of all your expenses. You can take pictures of receipts, track time and log mileage. Expensify puts it all together for you in an expenses report, which you can save digitally or print out.
Budgeting
Yolt is a free budgeting app that enables you to set spending goals and limits and track your progress against them. It categorises your spending into pots and provides attractive charts of your spending history. If you like you can receive alerts when bills are due.
Investing
Nutmeg is a low-cost investment platform where you can invest in shares, ISA’s and pensions. The app will advise the best option for you based on your risk profile. There are also social investment options available.
Bitcoin Prime is an investment app for those with the higher-risk profile advised for trading in the volatile cryptocurrency market. The app provides accurate data-driven market analysis in real-time, to help you make informed decisions.
Banking
Monzo, one of the new generation of digital challenger banks, has an attractive app format with some useful features. Like Yolt, spending is allocated to categories, with graphs. You can also opt to have expenditure rounded-up with the excess allocated to a savings pot. You can send money with a text message and if someone owes you a few pounds, send them a quick bill in the form of a text as well as a friendly reminder.
And of course, the high street banks have all brought out their own apps too. All of them are improving and all of them can also be complemented by some of the apps we’ve highlighted in this listing.
Since Open Banking was introduced, we have seen a revolution in financial products. We can all make our financial lives much easier by managing our money from the apps in our pocket, rather than last year’s PC or last century’s high street.