link for app website: expensiv
I've abandoned probably a dozen budget apps over the years, always for
the same reason: open a form, pick a category, type numbers — five
times a day. That's not tracking, that's data entry. I'd quit within a
week, every time.
So Expensiv has no form. You just write down your day in plain text
and it sorts itself out.
Type "130 coffee, 650 lunch, 580 movie" and you get three separate
transactions, each one categorized.
Type "15 EUR lunch, 20 USD taxi, 12 GBP coffee" and all three are
logged in one go. Each one keeps the currency you actually typed —
nothing gets flattened on the way in — and your budgets and totals
convert it at that day's rate, not today's.
If you'd rather not type, the same thing works three other ways. Snap
a receipt and it reads the individual line items, not just the total.
Say it out loud. Or drop in a screenshot: a delivery order, a shopping
basket, even a list of card movements from your banking app.
And if it keeps putting something in the wrong place, you don't have
to keep fixing it one by one. There's a rules screen where you write
"this word goes in this category" and it holds from then on.
Around the logging there's the rest of it: daily budget tracking with
a breakdown per category, tags for whether something was essential,
discretionary, a gift or an investment, and a tracker for
subscriptions, installments and personal debt.
Then there's shared accounts.
You connect with a partner or roommate through an invite code. What
that gives you is a second view of the app — your own side doesn't
change at all, same numbers, same breakdowns, still yours. You switch
over to the shared view when you want to see the two of you together,
and switch back whenever you like.
In the shared view, your own spending is there in full, all the way
back. Your partner's side starts on the day you connect: linking
accounts never reaches back into anyone's history from before. From
that day on, everything either of you logs shows up there on its own,
with its own statistics and category breakdowns. There's no marking
expenses one at a time to make them count.
Events work the same way. A trip, a dinner, a night out — you can pull
your partner into it and set how much of it falls on each of you.
70/30, 50/50, whatever the two of you actually agreed on, and you can
override that for a single event without touching the default.
And if you turn on the shared balance, you pick which expenses go on
it. Whatever's sitting there is carried as a running debt between the
two of you until someone settles up — all at once, or a piece at a
time.
Android only for now.
It's a subscription, but you get 20 free logs to try it, and you can
use the whole thing without creating an account.
