Released in March 2013, the personal finance app “Wally” has been highly rated by users and app reviewers as one of the best personal finance apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
Wally’s sleek design will help you keep track of your finances easily and enjoyably. “We ran a steam roller over the last version, trimmed some corners with an x-acto knife, and sprinkled some fairy dust all over the place,” says the Wally team of the new design.
How to use it
You only need to enter your monthly salary in addition to any other income you have, set a saving goal if you have any and start logging all your spending activities. This app has helped me a lot in realizing not only how much I spend but also in identifying spending areas where I tend to spend more money than usual.
Using the InstaScan feature, you can simply take a picture of any invoice you have and Wally will store all the needed information such as the Venue name, money spent and the category of your spending.
When logging your expenses, Wally also encourages you to add “aspects” to them. Simply put, aspects indicate the “why” of your expenses. For example, you may categorize your taxi fare under “Transport.” But you may also specify an aspect to it, whether it’s for “personal,” “work,” or “family” reasons. You can also add your own aspects, for example if you need to record certain expenses incurred for your wedding, you may want to create a new aspect called “Wedding”.
Wally also enables you to get insights on your expenses through its automatically generated charts and graphs. It also allows you to back up and export your data via iCloud and CSV email.
Privacy and security
As for the app’s privacy considerations, Wally is said to be 100 percent secure. According to the app’s privacy policy, none of your personal data is saved on Wally’s servers. But your scanned receipts and their OCR results are temporarily and anonymously stored for the improvement of Wally’s recognition engine.
Managing finances is not something we typically enjoy, and often we fail at tracking our money on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Wally’s review option gives you an insight about your spending patterns yearly, monthly or weekly.
Have you been using other apps to manage your personal finance? Please share with us.
