Best Expense Tracker Apps

If you have your money situation under control but want better charts and graphs for your finances, Personal Capital is a good option. It's actually a full-featured investment manager for hire, but its free personal finance dashboard is available for anyone who signs up and is packed with features.

Specific to expenses, Personal Capital automatically tracks and categorizes every expense you make on a linked credit or debit card. From there, the app creates charts showing your monthly cash flow with an ability to break down expenses by category and dig deeper into any concerning spending habits. It isn’t great for budgeting but is powerful for tracking your finances overall, particularly your investments.

If you run a small business, you might have attempted to run both your personal and business finances through one expense tracker app. This leads to messy reporting, unclear results, and difficulty understanding what is going on with both sides of your financial life. Plus, blurring your finances between personal and business can lead to problems with taxes and might harm your personal finances if your business is ever sued.

Like Mint, Intuit is the clear leader in this space through its popular QuickBooks program. QuickBooks comes in various versions and editions depending on your computer and business needs. While it is far from perfect, it currently is the most prominent and best option to wrap up your entire business management, including expense tracking, contract management, and payroll, all in one app.

Wally is an integrated expense tracker app that provides insights into your spending habits by syncing with your financial accounts. Wally has a big focus on expenses and presents feedback and useful information on your spending, but it also has a social feature for shared expenses. For example, if you share utilities with a roommate, Wally can track those expenses.

The appealing graphics and social features will be appreciated by millennial users. Note that Wally is available only on iOS devices.

No list of expense tracker apps would be complete without mentioning Mint, one of the most popular personal finance tools around. Mint is great because it is free, supports a wide range of banks and lenders, and comes from one of the largest and most trusted names in financial software, Intuit. With this app, you receive help with budgeting, expense tracking, credit monitoring, and bills.

However, while Mint is one of the oldest and most full-featured expense tracker app options, it isn’t perfect. There are a handful of bugs in the software, and new features have been slow to release since Intuit bought the app in 2009. If you find a bug or a problem in your account, getting support sometimes can be a challenge.

YNAB stands for You Need a Budget. The folks behind this app worked hard to build an app specifically focused on budgeting and expense tracking. The app takes an uncommon philosophy of budgeting. Users are forced to give a job to every dollar they earn, whether it is related to savings, expenses, or investments, and the app uses that to show user budgets.

The original version allowed for manual expense tracking only, though the newer update allows you to automatically import expenses from a linked bank account as well. It isn’t perfect for everyone, but if you want to start budgeting and need help getting the process moving, YNAB is likely a good fit for your needs.

How much money do you have to spend this month at coffee shops? How about on clothes? Most budgeting and expense tracking apps are designed to tell you what happened after you spend your money. Mvelopes takes a different approach and offers spending forecasts and suggestions to keep you from going overboard on your next visit to the mall, or Amazon, or wherever else you like to spend money.

Envelope budgeting is a style of budgeting that involves literally putting cash in envelopes at the start of the month, and you can spend until your envelopes are empty. Mvelopes takes that experience online, offering users digital envelopes to store their spending money each month.