So the first of the month flitted by.
As did the fifth, and then subsequently the month ended. Oh, months, will you ever change your ways? No. Somewhere between the mortgage or rent, the utilities, the Lowes card, the Capital One, the Care Credit for the cats, of course the car payment and insurance, and let’s not forget Junior’s daycare, somehow something slipped through the cracks of your airtight system… you know, that one notebook you keep on the kitchen counter. It’s not working, and also, it has spaghetti sauce and your dad’s pulmonologist’s phone number scribbled on it for reasons unknown. It’s time for a new system. And if you run your own small business from home or a nearby little office, your notebook is seriously going to love partnering up with an app.
Manilla
Check out Manilla for the Apple or Android platforms. This sweet little app allows you to set up your interface to see your account balances, due dates, and available balances. Even more sweet, it aggregates all data in real time, sends you alerts in said real time with reminders as to when what is due now, right now, yesterday, and so on. If you sync Manilla to your credit card or Groupon, it even tells you how many travel and other points you have garnered and when they expire. You can look at all your payables on your tablet on one screen. Say good-bye to opening three-dozen tabs in Chrome and having to scour your beloved notebook for login credentials.
Expensify
For those of you who trek around the country or the globe for business and find yourself misplacing receipts and other expense reportable items you could be using for write-offs later, Expensify has your well-traveled name all over it. Download this Android or iOS-friendly app on your next layover and start tracking data about how many miles you have driven for work (or for your own small business log for that super fun schedule K for next year’s taxes). Next you can sync up data about other travel incidentals, by creating a photo log of receipts before they become an entanglement of rubbish at the bottom of your purse.
Expensify allows you to directly enter data about air travel cost as well as vehicle mileage, and also has the ability to import data from most of the big financial institutions so you can see which account has what going on, and if you accidentally pay for that work-related iced latte with your personal Visa, you can manually reconcile that egregious error with Expensify. Also, the spaghetti stained notebook stays on the counter at home—make sure to take a screenshot of that pulmonologist’s number to email to your dad before you head to Hong Kong.
Budgt
Budgt is an iOS only app, but it’s beautiful simplicity is worth mentioning for sure. This crafty little app is easy on the eyes and the idea is super simple: set a budget. Ta-da! So what you do is set a daily budget for whatever you want: a vacation, business travel, or just being a human terrible at keeping track of budgets. For example, you could set your daily budget to $25.00 and break it down into categories of food, entertainment, emergency, cash bill payments, babysitter, and so on. Now, Budgt does not have an interactivity with your bank accounts or credit cards, that’s not really what it’s about—it’s about keeping you on track with a budget, seeing if you can stay under it, need to raise it, and over the course of 30, 60, and 90 days (and so on) you can begin to get a feel for where you’re money is going.
Yes, you spent $97 on passion tea lemonade in May. Way to go. No wonder your spaghetti notebook is afraid to send you notifications!
Image Credit: Ryan Ritchie
