

Manual tracking lets you organise your expenses better.Īpart from better organisation, a side benefit of tracking manually is staying in the loop with my income and expenses. This will give me a bird's eye view of all my purchases, and I can figure out my total expenditure on the set-up.

We can also take it further by using labels to group expenses.Ĭontinuing on the above example, if I want to find the total cost of my YouTube studio set-up, I can easily do it by adding labels to the relevant expenses: Adding a label for my studio expenses.Īnd then, I can use the search functionality to search for all expenses tagged with the label YouTube Studio. Or, how frequently did I order dinner: Figuring out the frequency of dinner orders in the Wallet app. Now, although these might seem like extra information and possibly fluff, these bits of knowledge help me track down any past expenses with a quick search.įor example, I can swiftly figure out how much money I spent on buying studio lights for my YouTube channel by searching my notes like this: Searching through my expenses in the Wallet app. Manually inputting each expense on an expense tracker app lets me choose the particular category for each payment and not rely on any AI or automated sorting like this: Choosing expense category in the Wallet app.Īnd, every time I add an expense, I can jot down a note to help me identify what the payment was for, like this: Adding a note for an expense in the Wallet app. This is where manually tracking expenses helps. You can only deduce so much from the payee's name, amount and category. This is a problem because although I was tracking everything, locating a specific transaction when needed took a lot of work. The apps can guess which category your transaction falls into, the payee name, and the used bank account.īut they can't identify what the purchase was.

With tracking automated, I barely opened the app to see the state of my finances.Īnd within a few months, I completely forgot that I was even tracking my expenses. I was tracking my expenses for sure, but I was still blind to how I was spending my money and how much I had left in my accounts. However, it also made me ignorant of my financial situation. This made tracking automated and one less thing to worry about.
Track expenses app android#
I was in the same boat when I started tracking my daily expenses.Īt the time, Android apps could read texts from banks to credit and debit transactions into my local records without supervision. Why would someone manually track their expenses in this age of automation and seamless 3rd-party connectivity? Let's start with: Why track expenses manually

In this blog post, I'll talk about why tracking expenses manually is an excellent habit and how I make the process less tedious. The process I use is relatively simple, takes two minutes, and only depends on making it a regular habit. When we speak about tracking expenses, the most common image that pops into our heads is crunching numbers on a spreadsheet and running complex functions. It has, on many occasions, helped me keep my spending in check and audit past expenses for accountability. Tracking expenses has been one of the most constructive habits I've built over the years.
