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mclld

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Nov 6, 2012
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I dont need budgeting and all that, I just want an app that will let me log basic spending and give me a summary or something I can look back on to see where money goes. I dont need to add bank accounts and a bunch of other features, I am only interested in an easy way to track spending
 
That might be a little hard to separate the two, as your budget generally helps you define your spending. Without defining your categories, it's a little harder to determine how some expenses are classified--like a $200 trip to a department store where you purchased multiple categories of goods.

That said, sometimes your bank's own app and website has the ability to tell you how you spend. I suspect it will just be limited to the retailers you buy from, but they won't have any idea how much you spend on groceries, clothes, etc.
 
I just want to keep track of what I am spending on gas, food and a few other things
 
I take it your looking for simplistic manual input. There's plenty of simple apps like that in the play store.
 
Mint. That’s a service with an app to do what you are talking about. I don’t have it but my husband uses it. I’m not sure this is what you’re looking for but you can check it out. It’s supposedly available in iOS and in the Google Play store.
 
Spreadsheet.

Column for date, payee, amount, and optionally classification (eg. Groceries, Utilities, Entertainment). Can have separate sheets for each month, or, one sheet for each account (credit card(s), checking, savings).

Excel for iOS can handle this and is free. Can sync via Live drive or Dropbox. On desktop, Office or LibreOffice to edit there. Can swizzle the data however you want, charts/graphs. And, no real vendor lock in.
 
I don’t use it myself but I know someone who’s been using Spending Tracker by MH Riley as a way of manually loggging and summarising personal spending and they like it. It has cross platform sync, which may be important to you.

For myself, I use a bank account that does a good job of automatically categorising and summarising my outgoings. This only really works because I’m able to use contactless card payment for almost all of my day to day low cost spending, however I’m assuming you’re in the US and my understanding is this hasn’t really taken off in the US. But if Apple Pay or Android Pay is an option I wonder if they have spending analysis (I’ve never really used them myself).

If you need to track spending for the purpose of splitting with others, I’d recommend Splitwise.
 
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gnucash is excellent. can use it on phone, tablet, computer because of versatility. it's pretty sophisticated and advanced.
for simple option you can try "Money manager" by realbyte. there are few others pretty decent. "moneyfy" or "money manager" by azv finance.
 
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