
Line graphs give you a quick view of your income versus your expenses. You can use the pie charts to determine what percent of your income you spend on various categories. Buxfer also has shared-expense tracking, which lets you send money to others, especially useful if you split rent or utilities with roommates.īuxfer offers simple reports that help you visualize your spending. One advantage of being primarily app-based is that you can always have your budget available and reference it when you’re out shopping.

You can use the categories to further refine your budgeting. You set an overall spending limit for each week, month and year you intend to budget. You can also edit the information if the automatic categorization isn’t accurate.Ĭreating a budget with Buxfer is easy. Once connected, your balances and transactions are added to Buxfer and automatically categorized.
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Once you create an account with Buxfer and download the app, you can connect it your bank and credit card accounts. If you just want a personal finance program to track your spending and manage a budget, not having those investment tracking features shouldn’t be a deal breaker. You can’t import information about your investments or use any of the tools for tracking fees or creating retirement savings goals. Quicken Starter has no tools for monitoring or tracking your investments. You can also use the app to take pictures of receipts and add those to your records. The Quicken mobile app also lets you check on your budget from your phone.

You can set up email or text alerts for when you approach or exceed your budget limit in a certain category. You can manually adjust the categories if default tags don’t match your budget.īudgets are easy to create and can be divided into categories to track how much you spend on groceries, rent and other items. Quicken Starter connects directly to your accounts and imports your balances and transactions, automatically categorizing them. This is our best value option because it gives you the same useful budgeting tools as Quicken Premier. You can also create retirement goals and use the calculator to evaluate your finances and determine what you need to save toward your retirement goals. Its tools analyze your portfolio and compare its performance with the market. If you own stocks or other securities, this is the best choice for you. Where Quicken Premier stands out is in its tools for managing investments. You can keep the same limit each month, or direct any unused amount to roll over into the next month. Quicken gives you multiple options for setting up your budget. The program sends alerts when you approach or exceed your budget.

Quicken color-codes your budget, green for within budget and red for over budget. The categories are used to help you organize your budget. If something is incorrect, you can edit it. When you connect the program to your account, it will import your transactions and categorize them automatically. The version of Quicken Premier we tested was incredibly easy to connect to any bank to track finances. It is one of the easiest programs to use that we reviewed. It’s incredibly easy to keep track of your spending and set up alerts for when you deviate from your budget.

Buxfer is the best mobile app we reviewed.
