Can Monefy Simplify Your Money for the Better?
Introduction
The first step to getting a handle on your finances is often by tracking your income, spending, and saving. But sometimes that’s easier said than done. Where do you start? How much information do you need to track? How hard will it be? How long will it take? These questions can be daunting. Luckily, Monefy is here to help, making tracking your money as simple as possible.
Image Description: A person using the Monefy app on their smartphone to track expenses.
The Good
Incredibly Simple Way to Track Spending
Monefy makes it easy to track your money. Adding transactions takes a few seconds. If I'm out shopping, I could add my transaction to Monefy while I was waiting for my credit card to process or the cashier to give me change.
Image Description: A user quickly adding an expense in the Monefy app while shopping.
Don’t Have to Link All of Your Accounts
Other financial apps make you link all of your bank and credit card accounts, and transactions don’t show up in the app until they hit the account. Because Monefy doesn’t require that step, you can track your transactions as you go and get your financial picture in real time. As an added bonus, since Monefy doesn’t have access to any financial accounts, you also don’t have to worry about hackers trying to break the encryption on the third-party app to get to your accounts.
Image Description: A lock symbol representing the security of not linking financial accounts in Monefy.
Exports Data in Spreadsheet Form
You can export the data to your Google Drive or Dropbox and open it in a spreadsheet program to get an additional layer of analysis on your spending habits.
Image Description: A spreadsheet showing exported data from the Monefy app.
No Commitment
Other financial apps try to turn personal finance into a relationship. Monefy is very hands-off. No notifications, no emails.
Image Description: A person enjoying a peaceful moment without any notifications from their phone.
The Bad
It’s All Manual
Because you have to input each transaction, it’s easy to get behind if not tracked in real time. If you don’t have a receipt or other record of your spending, it might be tough to remember how much you spent.
Image Description: A person manually entering expenses into the Monefy app.
Visualization Changes on You
As you add transactions, your pie chart of spending changes accordingly. Unfortunately, the category icons also get rearranged on the chart, so it’s easier to read. It can be jarring to reorient the pie chart every time you update it because you can’t always count on a category icon being in the same place.
Image Description: The Monefy app showing a pie chart of expenses that changes with each update.
Simple Can Be Limiting
Monefy tracks dollars and cents by category, and that’s basically it. If you’re wondering how much you’ve spent at a particular store, it’s up to you to put the store name in the note field. If you want to do any kind of deeper analysis, you need to export the data.
Image Description: A limited feature view in the Monefy app, showing basic spending categories.
Is Monefy Worth It?
I’ve always been the type of person who collects data but rarely ever does anything with it, so I loved this app for its simplicity. Monefy does everything I need it to do to get control of my spending habits, which is basically to answer the questions “How much am I spending?” and “What am I spending it on?” It’s quick and gives me info at a glance — and if I keep up with it — in real time. It’s great to have this tool on my phone and thankfully won’t inundate me with notifications.
Image Description: A user happily using the Monefy app on their phone to track expenses.
