Budgeting is a breeze

In today's digital banking world, the right financial app could save you time and money

- TOM WATSON

As society has moved away from cash, electronic transactions have naturally boomed. So much so that the average number of electronic transactions made by Australians has jumped from 300 to 650 each year over the past decade, according to the Reserve Bank.

Keeping track of these transactions can be tricky, especially for people who bank across multiple institutions. But for Australians looking to stick to a budget, it can be crucial.

To cater to people’s digital budgeting needs, an array of budget and money management apps has sprung up in recent years, including Buddy, Frollo, Goodbudget, PocketSmith, WeMoney and You Need A Budget (YNAB), to name a few.

Peter Marshall, a banking expert at comparison website Mozo, has researched money management apps as part of an annual awards program and has witnessed the budgeting app market grow both in size and sophistication in recent years.

“Looking back when we first started assessing apps, there were only eight or so,” he says. “There’s quite a few more now, though. Most recently we found 20, of which some are free, while some have a regular fee attached to them.”

How they can help

At their core, most budgeting apps are designed to enable users to create budgets and input transactions, but beyond those fundamental features Marshall says there can be some other particularly helpful tools to look out for.

“A really big one is categorisation of transactions, and a lot of the good apps do that fairly automatically now,” he says. “Some of them even go as far as giving you the ability to create new categories, so if you find that the categorisation that they’ve got set up doesn’t really meet your needs, you can adjust that.”