Which macOS/iOS app is suitable for personal finance?

I failed to recollect “how much I spent in a year for a category?”

This failure to recollect intrigued me to think about my personal finance. I did not have a concurrent budget plan. I was living pay-check to pay check and was attempting to save around 30% of monthly income. Not only that, but I was being content with my life and did not give a thought on financial goals.

Thinking about personal finance, I started to look at my bank transactions to gather information about my spending habits. This was easy when I used to take a glance in the online banking of my bank and checked the spend analysis details. But my current bank ING-DiBa AG has deprecated this feature (spend analysis).

I did not give a thought about the impacts of not having a spend analysis in your online banking. The spend analysis tool was present in my previous bank, Deutsche Bank AG. I was introduced to the spend analysis by my previous bank, Deutsche Bank AG. It helped me to understand my spending habits. Since the spend analysis tool is not present in my current bank, ING-DiBa AG. I need to fill the void created by the missing analysis tool.

My first approach was using the csv format exports of the transactions from online banking for a given month and use it to create a spreadsheet for that given month. I created a category column to categorise the transactions.

For example, let us consider you have a transaction.

The only thing it is missing in the above transaction is the category. Adding a category will make it easy to identify the income and expenses in a month. Adding a category for it will make it easy to create a breakdown in the reports (pie charts, etc.).

Doing the above process manually in the spreadsheet consumes a lot of time.

My second approach was trying out macOS/iOS apps. I came across the following macOS/iOS apps.

• GreenBooks
• MoneyWiz
• Chronicle

These apps are meant to help maintain our personal finances. I have tried the three applications and I found that the application MoneyWiz to be suitable for my needs. The application MoneyWiz learns to automatically add categories to most of the new transactions import that contains similar Payee name. During import the application MoneyWiz provides dialog box with visitations to help in linking transactions to categories. You can also create custom categories. The only con I found it does not provide the option to bulk edit different transactions that don’t have same Payee. The bulk edit only works in case the transactions contain the same Payee. You can also add colours and symbols to categories. I suggest you try the application MoneyWiz.

You can use my referral link to get application MoneyWiz from Setapp — https://my.setapp.com/signup/referral?referral=akarsh5. The Setapp subscription also contains other two apps in it. Which you can try them out.

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