Tracking spending is mission critical to ensure your business finances are in order. When you pinpoint spending, you have an accurate view of just how well your business is handling money.
Use a business expense tracker app and you can see how your company is doing in real time. This gives you the information you need to make financial pivots when necessary.
The following seven best expense tracker apps help you track and categorize expenses.
1. BizXpenseTracker (BXT) – Best for Small-Business Owners
The BizXpenseTracker (BXT) is a good overall tracker for small-business owners looking to capture all expenses, get organized and save money. This comprehensive app, on the market since 2010, tracks expenses, mileage and time.
A full-featured small-business expense tracking app, BXT allows for creating PDF and CSV reports for importing into Excel. The app features quick and easy on-screen filtering and file linking via email. Live mileage tracking ensures no mileage or time spent traveling is lost. For time tracking, this expense tracker app can be used to customize rates hourly, daily or by visit. The app also makes it simple to calculate overtime.
2. Concur Mobile – Best for Tracking Travel Spends
Fast and accurate creation of detailed expense reports is a necessity for the small-business owner working to stay competitive. Concur Mobile allows you to automate and integrate expense management. This business expense tracker app automatically captures spending and the resulting receipts from multiple sources and then processes the reports.
The Concur Mobile app simplifies the expense reporting process, making it easy to quickly track expenses like travel and reimburse employees. The Concur TripLink capability gives travel managers visibility of travel expenses, even if employees book directly.
3. Expensify – Best to Capture Receipts
Expensify offers a superior way to manage and save business receipts and record expenses. Launched in 2008, the app scans, reads and imports all receipt details. This includes foreign currency. This expense tracker app allows for syncing your credit cards so that company expenses are pulled in automatically.
With this app, receipts can be submitted directly to business managers or the company accountant, allowing for immediate expense approval or rejection right from the app. A next-day reimbursement feature allows for reimbursing employees quickly. You can also categorize, tag and group expenses so that reports can be easily created. The free expense tracker app allows for a certain number of complimentary scans per month.
4. Goodbudget – Best for Beginners
Good budgeting starts at home, and Goodbudget is designed with that in mind. As one of the best expense tracker apps, Goodbudget syncs between mobile devices and the web, allowing users to plan their household spending using what is known as the envelope method. This entails allocating a certain amount of income into various spending categories with a set monthly amount, such as rent/mortgage, groceries, childcare, transportation and debt payoff.
The user’s aim is to only spend what is in each envelope per month. With this expense tracker app, the virtual envelopes turn red if the budgeter overspends in that category, while money left over shows as green. The app was developed with the intent of helping users stick to budget limits without having to place actual cash into real envelopes.
5. Wally – Best for Millennials
Attractively and intuitively designed with millennial sensibilities in mind, Wally is an integrated expense tracker app with appealing graphics and social features. Wally centralizes your accounts to provide insight into your spending habits. This is accomplished by syncing with your financial accounts and using artificial intelligence. The focus of the app is on the user’s expenses.
Wally’s budget tracker allows for setting a budget and managing day-to-day spending categories. You can quickly and easily see if you are over or under budget. The app also has a social feature for shared expenses. You can start groups amongst family and friends and budget, track and sync together to reach shared goals. You’ll enjoy a consolidated view of joint accounts. That feature and more makes this one of the best expense tracker apps.
6. QuickBooks Online – Best for Comprehensive Financial Management
QuickBooks Online is one of the most extensive financial management programs on the market for small-business expense tracking. One of the program’s top features is the ability to upload receipts with a photo. An app automatically matches the receipt to existing expenses or creates new ones.
In addition to importing and categorizing expenses, QuickBooks has the capability of creating invoices, tracking inventory and receiving payments. Additionally, there is QuickBooks Capital. This feature allows you to access your business credit score. Your business credit score is determined by collecting information from banks, vendors, business credit card usage and other third-party sources. Banks, lenders and vendors will use this score to decide whether to do business with your company.
7. Everlance - Best for Reimbursement and Mileage
A popular app among the self-employed, Everlance provides solutions for how to keep track of business expenses. This app enables you to track mileage, expenses and receipts. You sync your credit cards and bank accounts to track expenses. The app, introduced in 2015, allows for easy categorizing and separation of business and personal expenses.
You can even set custom rules for recurring expenses and transactions. The app also tracks revenue, including income from multiple sources. Everlance uses GPS technology to track your trips and create an IRS-compliant mileage log. Mileage and expense reports can be quickly and easily exported via PDF and CSV Excel formats.
What does an expense tracker app do?
As its name suggests, an expense tracker app helps you track expenses. Such apps are either web- or smartphone-based and can be used on the go. You enter expenses and earnings, and the app stores, categorizes and tracks the information, providing monthly totals, charts and graphs.
Expense trackers can also be used to track your spending habits and provide suggestions for areas where you could make cuts. Such small-business expense tracking apps also enable you to keep your business and personal expenses separate.
How We Chose the Best Expense Tracker Apps
We chose these seven best expense tracker apps based on various criteria important to small-business owners and individuals. These criteria include ease of use and each app’s compatibility with smartphones and other apps. We also considered the breadth of each app’s features and tools. The more comprehensive the app and useable, the higher the score.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I use an expense tracker app?
While you can certainly keep track of your expenses without an app, doing so has many advantages. Expense tracker apps sync to your credit cards and bank accounts, as well as categorize your expenses. Such features help you understand your spending habits and ensure accurate financial records. This can save you a significant amount of time and money that you can spend building your business.
Is an expense tracker app worth the cost?
With the wide range of small-business expense tracking apps on the market, it’s easy to find an app that helps you streamline your expense tracking. Some expense tracking apps are free, while others charge a small amount. Compare the benefits of free apps to paid ones and decide if spending some money may be worth your while. Chances are you’ll find that paying for an app will save you money in the long run.
A version of this article was originally published on June 16, 2014.
Photo: Getty Images
