The analytical department of our company conducted a comprehensive study of mobile applications for managing personal finance and systematized the most popular items of expenditure among users of finance apps. Our financial company FinanceWorld performs in the sphere of finances, offering its clients high-level finance service and investment ideas in the sphere of business, startups, real estate, financial instruments.
Among the expenses recorded in smartphones, users spend the largest amount on the car and for its repair. In the top ten popular items of expenditure – “Products”, “Payment of loans”, “Expenditure on education”, “Travel” and others. A category of “Health” and “Rest” on the list was in 18th place.
In the TOP-10 financial applications that best meet the needs of users are the best finance apps. Among the advantages of the application, experts highlighted the ease of budgeting, cost planning, maintaining a joint budget, and monitoring credit resources.
In the second place is the Dollarbird scheduler. It can be tied to individual accounts, manually enter data about payments and receive additional bill details.
The third place in the ranking of the application goes to Mint – the only one that currently covers all available mobile platforms, including the Amazon Kindle.
Top 10 applications for personal finance:
- Personal capital
- Dollarbird
- Mint
- LearnVest
- Wally
- Goodbudget
- Mvelopes
- Cost Track
- RBC Bank myFinance Tracker
- YouNeedaBudget
Finance apps are one of the most popular on all mobile platforms. However, despite the serious competition of developers in this segment, users still have not received a convenient tool that would allow for automatically taking into account expenses and revenues without forcing a person to painstakingly enter the necessary data. Evaluating the applications, we first of all paid attention to how the developers solved the problem of data collection, how convenient and useful their applications are for users.
The main problem of the full functioning of financial applications is the lack of technical standards for the provision of financial data by banks and trading companies.
Many functions of financial analysis are not available due to the technological passivity of financial institutions that are not ready to jointly develop universal solutions. Banks and trade organizations do not allow users to gather a solid financial picture by offering separate applications or ignoring developers' requests for data.
The analysis revealed the main user requirements for finance apps created for financial accounting. Among the sought-after or most anticipated functions are automatic monitoring of loan payments, centralized collection of movement data on different accounts and cards, and simplified data entry.
Applications were evaluated by 11 criteria: support for mobile platforms, cost, availability of additional costs (embedded purchases), budgeting, the ability to link multiple accounts and credit rating monitoring, the availability of suspicious transaction alerts, and a calendar of planned expenses.
