School Life (Must have apps part 1)

It’s been a while I contributed to utopian.io and this is due to the recent happenings around me. Today I’m happy to make my first contribution after months of absence.

I’ll be writing on a series that I title “School Life (Must Have Apps)”. This series will look at some necessary apps that every student should have to enable the person function more effectively.

Introduction

A lot of young people aspire to live a good and well calculated life while in school but the lack of proper finance management always has a way of making them go broke. Most of these would have been avoided if they had a proper budget management tool or if they had a means of monitoring their day to day expenses. Sometimes we just spend at the go and won’t even notice that the so little cash that we are using is actually eating up the bulk allocation we had. We tend to take precaution in big spending but neglect the small $5 we recklessly throw away. In the long run, we then realize how depleted our reserves are, and sadly that is when we start asking ourselves what we have been doing with the money. It is then that our mathematical talent shows up, and we then realize the need for proper budget documentation.

Proper budgeting and daily expenses documentation still remains the main way to keep track of our daily spending and this also acts as the major method of knowing what we can afford and the things that we can’t afford at a particular time.

This particular blog post is focusing solely on the open source application known as Budget Watch.

What Is Budget Watch

Budget watch is an Open source application that enables you to properly monitor your day to day finances. This includes your day to day expenses, your day to day revenue and all your day to day financial transactions. It gives you the ability to constantly monitor and evaluate your spending habits.

Features of Budget Watch

Simple UI

The User interface of the application is simple and straight forward for anyone to navigate.

This is one of the reasons I love the application.

The Budget Feature

This feature makes it possible for the
application users to create a budget for a specific period. This is where the user inputs the amount of money He or She intends to spend over a certain. Users are free to create as many budget as the user wants.

The Transaction Features

This feature makes it possible for the user to accurately record and monitor His/hers day to day transactions. It is here that you record all your expenses and revenues.

The budget by defaults shows all transactions for the present month but you can change to your specific period whenever you want.

Import/Export Feature

This is a plus for me as it makes it possible for users to back up their activities on the app.

My Personal Review and Suggestions

As an active user of the budget watch application, I feel it is right for me to drop my own personal review of this application.

Personally I enjoy the simple User interface because it’s straight to the point without unnecessary distractions. The features mentioned above all worked perfectly as at the time of this post.
One other feature that makes the application outstanding to me is the ability to take photos of
Receipts. Some of us are careless with receipts and that means we now have a secured way of saving it alongside the details of the transactions.

The main downside for me is the inability of the recorded revenues within the time frame to reflect in the budget. I would prefer if they made all incomes within the specified period to reflect in the budget total.

I will also appreciate if they had made it possible to select individual dates for each budget instead using the same date range as seen in the application.

NOTE: The above review is my own personal view towards the
application and thereby does not mean you will feel the same way about the
application

Conclusion

Financial Accountability is an attribute that everyone should strive to have and that’s exactly what Budget Watch has made me achieved. I now know how I spent every cent of my budget. Using Budget Watch takes away the assumption spirit and cuts off unintended spending as you have to follow your budget every day. However, you might not achieve the aim of having this app if you fail to follow and document your Budget, Expenses and Revenues.

Links

Project Repository:

https://github.com/brarcher/budget-watch

Github Profile:
https://github.com/dongentle2

Android Play Store Link :
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=protect.budgetwatch.play

Resources

This post and all its content was written by me based on my experience,
research, knowledge, and personal usage of the Budget Watch Android application.
Most Images are from my usage screenshot and all other ones are properly
referenced.

Series Backlinks

This is actually the first post in this series.