Expenses Manager – Just Perfect!

I’ll be honest that I don’t track my personal expenses by maintaining some system.
So why this write-up Prajjwal? Because, my relationship with expense tracking has been a mixed one. Just like how you play some trendy games and get bored and switch to another and after a sometime you might get nostalgic to play that game again! Similarly, one fine day I decide to track my expenses (for the only reason that I find a good app) use it for maybe a month and then the task seems too tedious to me and I stop tracking. This story gets played in my life every few months!

This time my habit has been reignited similarly when I came across this Indie app called as “Expenses Manager” (Ha! pretty straight forward name for an Expense Manager app!). So, this app has been developed by Indian app developer named Amit Mohan.

Let’s get started with this review below!
Also, this note that this is not an APP review, I would more-off like to call it a ‘service’ review of which the app is at its core! So what’s that service? It’s a community service to empower and educate everyone to start getting into the habit of tracking your expenses, budgeting and even investing your savings!

Hence, I’ve divided this article in 3 parts!
1. The app
2. Knowledge Sharing
3. What this app isn’t!

1. App – the Core done right!

As I mentioned before, I try managing expenses only when I like the app. This app as expected really offers an attractive and functional interface from the time you open the app for the first time. This is what I call getting the core of the service just correct!
A big button for adding your expenses or incomes.
A menu accessible from the bottom that’ll take you to various sections of the app such as transactions, budgets categories, payment modes, etc.
A charts button at the top (not the very top) right to analyze your spendings in the form of pie charts, and comprehensive figures/insights, etc.
Comprehensive and just the right amount of settings to make the app your own!
All in all, one thing I’ve simply concluded at this stage is that the app is just perfect, with no gimmicks and or nonsense stuff. The app offers everything needed in an expenses manager along-with a modern, intuitive interface and seriously— hits it Bang on the target! This is, I feel, an important step where the developer just…gets it right!

Yes, the app has premium subscription based plans too; Before I get into the pricing, let me tell you that the free is no slouch in its offerings. I’ve been using this app since a month now and never ever felt that I should go for the premium plans. The premium plans offers deeper insights into your incomes and expenses, Auto backups, generating PDF reports for your spends, unlimited categories, tracking through #tags, etc.

While this feature list in the premium plan is no wonder very, very useful for power users, if you are like me are an on/off user, you shouldn’t worry about buying the app. But for savvy users… I would recommend going for the annual plan (obviously!).
The app offers 3 plans (monthly – ₹39/month i.e. 468/yr ; bi-annually – ₹189 for 6 months i.e. 378/yr ; annually – ₹299/year). Of-course, the dev wants users to go for the annual plan 😂
The iOS payment plans are a bit expensive (there is a ₹50 differential on the annual, ₹80 differential on the bi-annual & and a whopping ₹600 differential in the monthly plan if calculated on per year basis – obviously the dev is discouraging users to not opt for the monthly plans on both the platforms as the other 2 are more appealing!)

To all the daily power users looking for a good expense manager – Trust me, you can’t go wrong with the premium plans of this app! (specially the annual one)

With the app portion being successfully cracked, let’s dive into the other portion – the Knowledge Sharing

I’ll be honest the dark mode in this app is really beautiful!

2. Knowledge Sharing

I’ve gone through the social media handles of this app and one thing is clear, that the developer is not promoting its app! (apart from just usual milestones or some important announcements!). Instead, the developer is spreading knowledge about finance for the newbies—savings, investments, finance concepts, IPO updates, finance quotes, etc. While it may seem confusing at first as to why an ‘app-page’ is getting into spreading knowledge about finance, the answer is in the question itself. The dev is not trying to be just an app page that shares app updates, he is trying to create a community of making people aware about finance, investing, and savings with the app taking center stage!

Imagine a scenario-
1. You track your expenses daily using this app.
2. You then go after a while to analyze your weekly/monthly spends and savings, etc. and see that you’ve spent less (hence, you can consider investing!) OR you’ve spent more (maybe you should drill down to know the reasons for the same!)
3. The app at the same time offers you some articles too inside about how to save money, staying on top of your expenses, high level investing avenues, etc. which might further drive you in to practice these healthy finance habits!
4. Want to be more savvy? The app has its own page on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter which provides content on a regular basis! It doesn’t have some burgeoning follower counts (neither do I), but it shows in the intent!

3. What the app isn’t!?

If you all are assuming that this app is trying to be a super app, no it’s not.
The app doesn’t have those fancy features of tracking your spendings by scraping through your emails and SMSs; It’s just a simple expense tracking app that works by a manual entry mode. Meaning the app won’t do any work for you, you will only make it a point to open the app and enter your expenses. Yes, the app can send you daily reminder notifications to add expenses! You can even set a reminder to book an expense in future (in a situation if you’re uncertain whether you will incur it or not, then at the time of the reminder you can either book it or snooze it!)

The app also isn’t an investment platform that would throw you suggestions regarding where to invest your balance savings, etc. At most, what the app can do is empower you to do your own research by suggesting its own articles on their blog to read!

To sum up, I would say the app will do everything it can from its side to help you achieve your financial goals, but in the end, you have to realize that it’s only YOU who have to get into the execution part!

I guess we can place it in a category of App as a Service (AaaS)😁; Watsay?

Feedback

Lol…any review from appsaware would be incomplete without any feedback…
Here is just 1 point which I would like to give to the dev!

A better onboarding experience

The current onboarding screens are just an intro of the app and the features it offers. While some users are pretty comfortable getting used to any app’s interface, there are also a set of users who don’t. A brief tutorial highlighting what button does what and what all things can be done inside the app would be very helpful, (say, more deep dive into the insights section as to the kind of insights available!)

and Done!

So guys, that’s all from our side. Hope you enjoyed reading this article. Expenses Manager app is free to download on both android and iOS: Click on the links below to download the app (Nope, these aren’t any referral links!😅)

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