Family budget app: which one to choose?

As long as you live with your parents, the way of managing money is generally ruled by lightheartedness and the freedom of doing whatever pleases you. Traveling, buying clothes or a new car: all you had to do save up some money and decide how to splurge. Then we grow up, we go to live alone and things start to change. Before making that crazy purchase that we are craving so much, we have to take into account “deal” all the expenses related to rent, electricity and gas bills, taxes. And if we decide to start a family? Here the situation becomes even more complicated and keeping our finances at bay could really become a pain in the neck. Fortunately, as always technology comes to our aid, with a myriad of apps specifically designed to make home accounting management much easier. Here are a few of the users’ favorites.

Money Pro

It is an app with many features and easy to use. It is among the most loved and downloaded of all times, precisely because it combines ease of use with a good variety of tools useful for the purpose. First you have to enter all the information relating to your balance sheet, then you have to report all your balances as well as the recurring incomes and expenses. With very intuitive graphics highlighting revenues in yellow and income in blue, it will be easy to quickly access to an overview of your financial situation. You will just have to update the app from time to time in order to always keep everything under control. Other functions include payment planning and budgeting, which also allows you to divide expenses by categories. The only flaw is that the application is only available for iOS devices.

Expense Manager

There are easy apps to keep an eye on your family budget also for Android users. One of them is Expense Manager. It comes in an Ad-free version, which avoids the hassle of advertisements popping out every now and then, and in the free version. You can use different currencies, and thanks to the internet access the exchange rate is always up to date. It looks like a tablewhere you can enter your expenses. In the default program there are already items that indicate common expenses, such as medical or food related expenses, obviously offering the possibility of customization by adding new items. It is not very straightforaward right away, but once you understand how it works it becomes a piece of cake.

Excel

If you don’t want to waste time looking for the perfect app, you can always rely on the good old Excel. The Microsoft program that came to light in 1985, it was in fact designed precisely to create and manage electronic spreadsheets. The software already makes pre-set templates available in both free and premium versions. One example is Money in Excel which also allows you to connect the program to financial institutions for automatic synchronization of information and transactions. It has come a long way since it first appeared on personal computers. With modern graphics, a number of tips that are provided during the use, and a series of additional functions, it could prove to be a good choice in many cases.