36 Product Review
This handy and free little app will help you make sense of your financial shenanigans.
Written by William Urbanski
PRODUCT REVIEW
A
h, the eternal question: “What happened to all my money?” Most people reading this have probably spent a large part of their life pursuing money and yet feel they have precious little to show for it. It’s also probably fair to say that most people would like to hang on to more of their hard-earned bucks. Common knowledge suggests that in order to have a little more left over at the end of the month, what you need is a budget. Well, if you’ve worked for more than five years and are constantly running out of money or don’t have at least a few grand at your disposal, what you really need is a swift kick to the back of your pants. You also need to start tracking where all you money goes.
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
May 2020
Tracking personal expenditures is important for a number of reasons, the most important being that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. The second reason is that it elevates spending to a conscious, deliberate act rather than just a habit. By adding an extra step (such as writing down each and every purchase) it also acts as a barrier to spending. That is, you’ll take one extra second to consider a purchase because you’ll know there’s an extra little thing you’ll have to do. As well, forcing yourself to take a cold, hard look at your financial exploits at the end of every month is antithetical to self-deception. For many, many years, I followed a simple but rustic (and dare I say, rugged) system of tracking my purchases. I paid cash, kept the receipt, and then logged it manually into a notebook under an assigned category. Then at the end of each month, I’d tally up all the expenses by category, which would give me a very clear picture of where my money went. This process may seem tedious, and at times it certainly was, but I don’t regret doing it. That being said, after keeping on the straight and narrow for a number of years, I noticed a number of problems arose, mostly due to my own laziness. The biggest problem was that often, I simply wouldn’t record my expenses every day and seemingly every week, I would have a big stack of receipts that had to be logged. This was time-consuming. The other major problem was that I was actually keeping two separate records: one for logging the
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day-to-day expenditures and one for summing them all up. Eventually, I did switch to using Excel to do some of the work (there were reasons why I stuck with pen and paper for so long), but logging the receipts and busting out the calculator to do some good old-fashioned number crunching was just taking too much time away from burning my eyes out on Instagram and YouTube. So, the search for a new system was afoot. It was around this time that I remembered that smartphones exist and someone had probably solved this problem already. And so, it came to pass that I found and tested a number of apps that use a newfangled technology called Optical Character Recognition (or OCR). Using OCR, the apps could take a picture of a receipt, extract the financial information and log it automatically. Deus ex machina! Actually, not quite, because pretty much all these apps were steaming piles of odorous excrement. The biggest problem was that to use the OCR technology in the first place, the user has to pay per picture and it is not cheap, in the range of 20 cents. Paying that kind of money basically undermines the whole point of me tracking expenses in the first place, so the search continued. Ultimately, I stumbled upon one of the best, simplest, and cleanest little apps ever. Money Manager is brilliant in its simplicity and extremely intuitive. Not only is the app free to use, it’s also free of banner ads or any other advertising. After opening the app (which takes up less than 30 MB), you see your running total for the month. To add a purchase you just have to click the yellow plus sign at the bottom. From there, you can choose from a plethora of pre-determined categories (or even make your own) to which you add your purchase. Next, you enter the amount of the purchase, add a memo (if you want), hit the check mark and, voila – the amount is automatically logged and added to the running total. All these purchases are input into a pie chart that neatly and simply summarizes your expenses, both by aggregate total and percentage, so you know, to the won, exactly how much you’re spending.
4/24/2020 4:15:39 PM
