Expense management apps have been a steady category on the app stores on multiple platforms. After all, who doesn’t want to suddenly find some extra money? The tried and tested way to make that happen more often is saving and cutting back on spending, and that’s where these apps come in. While there are quite a few choices that are good in this category, there are some that take the management bit to the next level. WealthPack from Edelweiss is one such app.
Like most apps in this category, it begins with scanning your SMS inbox for all transaction updates. Depending on the amount of data you have this may take a while. For example, I have more than a year’s worth of messages on my phone and it took about 3-4 minutes to go through them all (I know it’s not my phone’s issue because similar apps took lesser time to go through them). The reason here might be the greater degree of insights and analysis that this app performs and provides, as we will soon see.
Once the app is ready, it takes you straight to the Dashboard with one tap and that is where your monetary enlightenment starts. The initial dashboard neatly highlights the current month’s expenses, inflows and investments while scrolling lower gives you category-wise expenditure detail, cash wallet status, recent transactions and any outstanding bills you may have (which is particularly a useful thing to show). Also, scrolling sideways on the overview on top shows you additional fields like your remaining bank balance. When you are in the transaction section, you can actually enter transactions manually as well for all those cash payments and transactions that are not linked to your mobile number.
Going to the Transactions section will, in turn, show you all your transactions as a chronological list, and if you enable the “By categories” toggle, you will be able to see the same divided into expense categories and subcategories. For example, you want to see your last 5 transactions on Movies and Events, you can do that! I sure realised how rarely I go to the movies. You can also mark any transaction as Reimbursement, which you can later check together in the Reimbursement section.
Next, the Accounts section shows you the balance in each of your accounts in the Banks and Cards section, your Cash Wallet status (with the option to update the value) and ATM withdrawals each month in the Cash Wallet tab, and a Business Accounts tab to update details about Business accounts and Credit cards.
One of the best things about this app is the Analytics section. This section starts off by showing you your spends across categories in the last 6 months as a pie chart. Rotating that pie chart till the desired category is highlighted and then hitting the “Show subcategories” checkbox then generates a pie-chart of the subcategories within that category. The Expense and Investment tab compares the two in the form of a bar chart. The Expense medium tab once again uses a pie chart to show from which card or account you spend the most. The categorized expenses tab is essentially the first tab’s data as another graph.
One more interesting feature is found in the Bill section, where you can check a specific vendor for whom you can see the bill trends over the last few months. Now you know why your phone bills looked unfamiliar this time around, right?
That pretty much covers everything apart from the Insights section, that compares your spending to the community average, and the Calendar section that shows your spending on, you guessed it, a Calendar!!
If you are one of those people who do end up cash-strapped towards the end of every month or are just simply worried about the status of your savings, this one is really a very useful app to keep in your phone and meticulously check through on a regular basis. And as we have said earlier – don’t expect the app to magically make you rich, you’ve got to use all this data and a tiny pinch of willpower to actually see that money stacking up and this is almost as good as it can get for a tool to help you with that right now.
Play Store: http://dgit.in/WPackPS