So I’m trying to find a decent android application to help me budget and figure out where my cash goes.
Requirements / what I want it to do:
Receipt scanner / photo of item bought
At least the ability to enter in the total for each receipt
Ability to OCR the scanned receipt to scrape information (again, at least the bill)
Ability to tag / categorise spends
So far I have Money Owl:
And also wave receipts
wave has the ability to scan and OCR read the totals from receipts . it does this via the cloud, so it does require a data connection. At present it is FREE for personal use.
Id definitely recommend this app. Most 21st century way of capturing where your money is going. Just what I was looking for!
Apparently, google drive has the ability to ‘scan’ receipts. I have to try this one out!
I use:
http://www.youneedabudget.com/
and once I had a few epiphanies about the mindset and logic involved it really is a fantastic piece of software and the only budgeting app that has kept me within spending goals for several months. You need the desktop app (I bought it on steam) for anything to work, you then can have the iPhone or Android app. I’ve not tried the android version but the iPhone app works great. To sync data you’ll have to be prepared to use Dropbox (I assume you’ll have a problem with Mrs Condoleeza ‘Torturer’ Rice’s appointment to the board).
All In all though I heartily recommend it, my biggest thing was realising it’s not accountancy software it’s budgeting software so use it as such, use the balance of your finances IT presents to you not your current account balance before making any spending decisions and it’s wicked software. So I can open YNAB on my phone, see what the balance in my budget for category X is (or what the balance unassigned is) before spending money. This way the money that is already allocated for outgoings later in the month (to mobile phone, tv, internet, petrol, food, debt repayment) is not involved in any spending decision it shouldn’t be.
tl;dr; Most software I found is accountancy or tracking software. It was great for tracking where my money was going it was absolutely piss awful for helping me change my spending patterns and behaviours. YNAB is good enough at tracking and does present some lovely graphs to see where I could be going wrong. It’s excellent at slowly and gently teaching me to change my behaviours.