Adulting through finances: Top 7 smartphone applications to manage your finances

1. Bank apps

Using your own bank’s applications to understand how you are using your funds is probably the best way, as there is always accountability associated with your service provider. Each bank would have its own applications - that avail services from providing mini statements to transferring funds - available on play store and iStore.

2. Splitwise

Credits: Splitwise website

What feels like it is the most annoying thing after you go out with friends? Of course, while it is heart-wrenching to see money leave your account, it is a tedious job to see how much is to be sent to who all. Splitwise acknowledged this problem and created an eponymous app to provide a solution. After creating an account, either with your mail-id or your phone number, Splitwise lets you add friends to your account, kind of like a community. You can have multiple such ‘communities’ for your different friends or family groups. In each group, one can add the amount of total money spent, add a description for it, choose whether to split it equally or not and even add an image and special note regarding the expense. The money that one owes and is owed will be displayed along with the group tab. This helps in tabulating accounts easily and avoid any possible feuds.

3. Money Manager

Credits: Money Manager App

Managing finance, especially when you’re living away from your fund-givers, is tough. You need to allocate your resources in a sound way, spend them wisely, and save some for future needs. Money Manager, from Realbyte Inc., has income and expense tabs to segregate your respective credits and debits and has a transfer tab too to separate specific and important transfer records. The default currency is Dollar but can be changed. The statistics of income and expenses can be checked, and also the data can be analyzed on a weekly and monthly basis.

4. AndroMoney

Credits: AndroMoney

Unlike the name suggests, this money-managing application is available on both Android and Apple platforms, but you will have to pay for it on the latter. Here, while performing all the necessary services, the user can add an account, create categories while adding keywords. This makes it easier to find a specific transaction or a specific history in the statements.

5. Walnut

Credits: Walnut

Walnut Expense Tracker, from Thumbworks Technologies Private Ltd., asks for your permission to read and manage your SMS. This way, it keeps a record of your transactional history, when and where you have spent it. This allows you to go back to check and analyze for yourself what your spending pattern is. You can cut your expenses and reallocate your resources based on this data.

6. MyMoney

MyMoney, from Ananta Raha, is an interesting choice, as it allows the users to set budgets for categories (there are default categories, but are customizable), like a car, clothing, education, electronics, etc. An analysis of daily, weekly, or monthly expenditure is available in charts and graphs.

7. UPI platforms

Credits: Creative Commons

Unified Payments Interface has become a revolution in fund transfers in India, and the cornerstone of the revolution are students. Direct transfer to accounts is more convenient than digital wallets and is almost ubiquitous now. To transfer money to friends, or shop vendors, or even after cab and rickshaw rides, UPI platforms are heavily depended upon. Popular platforms include the likes of PhonePe, Google Pay, PayTM, and BharatPe. All these platforms also provide e-wallet services.

Without mentioning names, a heads-up has to be given: on personal loans. It is quite inevitable for students to run out of money from time to time. There are businesses that target this vulnerability. While sometimes it is okay to apply for short-term loans (meant specifically for students), you cannot always trust these vendors on many levels, especially regarding the confidentiality of your data. Any default on payment could damage your reputation (as your guarantor would be informed), or like mentioned before, it could compromise your data. So, always be careful whilst opting for such avenues.