Tracking your expenses can benefit your financial planning, however it is hard to remember to save receipts for the smaller purchases you make where you perhaps do not use a card to pay. Pennies is an app that aims to help you track your expenses.
Money Meter
In Pennies, you have a main “money meter” as the base of the app. You set a standard monthly budget and then as you get expenses, enter these into the app (more on that later). A meter, that looks just like a gas meter in a car, clearly shows you how much you have left, in a graphical fashion. Above it is shown the actual amount. A very nice graphical touch!
Functionality
Pennies is just about tracking your expenses. If you are looking for an app that track both income and expenses, this is not the one for you. In fact, this is why I like Pennies so much. It gets a bit troublesome sometimes to keep the financial app in sync with your bank account, in which case you can just look at the bank account statements.
With Pennies, all you do is enter the expenses in a number of pre-defined categories. My wish here is to be able to set up your very own categories, even though that it is clear that the user interface is built around the pre-built ones. I just want to have some items in more precise categories than what exists.
I would also very much like to see the ability to change the date of an expense as I sometimes remember that I forgot to add an expense a day later, in which case I want the date to be accurate.
Adding New Expenses
As you have probably guessed by now, adding expenses within Pennies is not hard either. There is a clear button on the front screen that reads “Add Expense”. This takes you to a simple and to-the-point screen with the listing of the built-in categories and a numerical keyboard that lets you type in the amount of the expense.
Thanks to the simple interface design here, adding a new expense does not take very much time and can essentially be done while putting down a receipt from the store in your wallet.
Expense History and Exporting
You can at any time go back to previous months and view your history, as well as view the current month expenses in a more organized list, where you can also add comments to the items. The interface for this is very stylish and a breeze to use which is a major plus.
You can export your expenses from Pennies into a CSV (comma separated file) that the app sends to an email address of your choice. This means that your expenses are not just stuck within Pennies, props to the developers for the good thinking there!
Conclusion
Pennies for the iPhone or iPod Touch is the killer app if you only want to track expenses and not your income as well, which for me is the combination I am after. Pennies user interface is among the top ones in the apps I have on my phone and makes it a breeze to use. I would like to see some additional customization features added and more advanced budgeting and editing capabilities in order for this to be a super app.
Pennies
Keep track of where you are spending your money—the easy way. With just two taps you can enter your monthly budget and begin tracking your expenses from within a beautifully designed and simple interface.
- design by knife
- Get on App Store
- $2.99
All info was collected on 3rd March, 2010 when the app was reviewed.
About Erik Bernskiold
Erik is is a Web Designer, Photographer and Software-Trainer. He is the owner of Bernskiold Media who runs graphic and web development software-training website Bernskiold Learning and web design and development company XLD Studios.
Looks remarkably similar to MoneyBook. I wonder who ripped off who?
Yeah it does indeed. I have been under the impression that Pennies is indeed the first of the two but would definitely benefit a bit from some of the MoneyBook features with the charts and statistics.
Is it possile to link 2 users together like with that GroceryIQ app? I’m looking for one that my wife & I can use together and have any expense entries we enter be available for us both to see ad record.