How to Easily Track Expenses as A Home Entrepreneur?

Track Expenses
(Last Updated On: August 17, 2019)

One of the most important habits that you should adopt now as a home entrepreneur, is to regularly track your expenses.

I was totally lost before having this habit.

Many years ago, I used to spend all my monthly income on stuff that I didn’t really need, besides my business investments. And I didn’t worry about it at that time, because I was young, not married yet, and had no clear personal goal in life.

I have always felt that my employer will always keep me in the company, until retirement. No matter what!

However, I felt frustrated the day I wanted to marry my wife, and I didn’t have enough money to cover marriage expenses. How come I didn’t have money, although I had a job for 8 years.

I didn’t save enough money for any future plans. And I dealt with all expenses as they are all essential stuff.

Until, I realized that I have to write expenses on a daily basis. And that was even before meeting my wife.

How Did I Start to Track Expenses?

I tried to write down the daily expenses at the end of each page of my planner. Every day!

After doing so for many years, I got lost. I wanted to find what exactly was eating up all my income. So, I had to sum up all the days of the months “manually” to get the total expenditure for the month. But still couldn’t categorize the expenses or find the leak.

It was a very heavy manual work, and it wasn’t efficient at all.

So, I tried to use spreadsheets to manage the expenses of a certain personal project including marriage itself. But although it was very helpful, it included many manual tasks as well.

To be able to keep track of expenses on a spreadsheet, I had to write expenses on paper or my smart phone while I am away, then migrate them to the spreadsheet when I get back home. So, again it was extra work.

Then, I had to search for a solution. A friend recommended a mobile application, to enter expenses once they occur, and later run on-demand reports to figure out the expenses behavior.

Then, the operating system on my mobile crashed and took all the data with it.

AndroMoney Gave Me Control

I soon discovered another awesome app called AndroMoney, which I recommend for your personal finances and expenses tracking.

I started using it in the beginning of 2017, and it was very useful since then.

The interface is very nice, and the features really helped me to easily track and control my business as well as my family expenses.

You can add your accounts, whether they are real bank accounts or virtual accounts that you made up to categorize your money.

Transactions

Mainly, you can add a new entry from the first screen you get, which is normally the transactions of the day. This can be changed to the transactions of the week, month or even a year.

Once you start adding the entry, you will notice that you can choose if it is an expense, income or transfer transaction from inside the entry screen. Which is very handy and convenient.

Of course you will see the default currency that can be changed easily. The date and time. And many other categorization fields.

Those fields are the category, the account, the project, the payee and if the transaction is one time or periodic.

You can also add some notes, and choose whether you want to include the entry in the account total and budget. Yes, I said budget!

So, back to the main options. You will find on the main menu four main features as follows:

Account

The account screen shows a summary of all your accounts, total assets, total liabilities and balance. And from there you can get access to each account as well to find the entries of that specific account.

You can add a new account and choose its type, cash, bank or card. And also, you can specify the opening or starting balance. currency. and some notes.

Of course you can edit or remove existing accounts as well.

Budget

What I love about this area, is that it helps me have some control on my expenses. It alerts me when I reach a certain amount of expenses, on a specific category, that has a preset budget. I can choose to ignore the alert. But at least I have someone “or something” that let’s me know that I am wasting money.

From the main budget screen, you can set a fixed monthly budget, and it will automatically calculate the yearly, weekly and daily budgets based on that. Of course it is not very accurate to set daily and weekly budgets based on a total monthly budget. Because you can buy all your grocery items in the first week, and spend very less during the rest of the month.

However, it is just an estimate of how to stay within the budget, if you can spend equally every day.

You can set the threshold amount, where you want to get the alert. And you can set the percentage of the budget you want to allocate, for each category as well. Which is a very awesome feature.

Category

You have two category levels only. The parent categories and the sub-categories of the parent categories. It is nice to avoid over complicating. But sometimes I find myself adding two semi-identical categories and naming them in away as if they are related. Just because I can’t add more levels of the sub-categories.

I believe they should consider allowing more levels, to make it more usable.

You can choose icons for each category, to visually identify them inside your entries lists, and the reports as well. Which is very cool.

And categories can be created for income, expense and transfer types separately.

Report

Here is the part that I love. I keep entering the transactions daily and forgetting about them. Then anytime I need to check my expenses or check last month’s trends I just open the reports screen and have fun viewing my spending behavior.

Then, I can take decisions based on those nice graphical reports.

The reports available are Pie Chart, Trend Chart and Bar Chart reports.

You can choose expense or income or both for your report. You can specify the period “date from to” of course. And you can filter based on accounts, expense or income categories, transfer, project, payee or payer or note.

The reports are very flexible and comprehensive for personal expense tracking.

And finally, the application has a lot of settings and configurations that are very helpful like: notifications, automatic backup, first day of the week, start day of the month, color picker, date format, auto-fill by category on transaction entry, password lock, default currency and auto-sync with the web interface on exit.

So you can check your data from the web interface as well, even if your mobile hardware or software crashes your data is safe.

All those features that I now enjoy are free, although you will see a small Google Ad at the bottom. But you can hardly notice it actually.

Conclusion

Tracking expenses is very essential if you want to save money for yourself and your family, or really buy things that matter. Without having any control on expenses, you will normally be broke most of the time, because you will just follow impulsive buying decisions, thinking that you will always have money. Which is not true.

That’s about your personal expenses. So, what about your family? If you keep buying things that every member of your lovely family wants, you will eventually make them miserable. When you tell them later that you have zero money, when they really need it for important stuff like medication or school or even going on a yearly family vacation, they will be very sad!

Got my point?

Start using AndroMoney today, it is free. And let me know if you have any questions about it or about tracking expenses in general. If you have any questions about AndroMoney, I will answer them as a loyal user. Please post them in the comments below.

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  • The app is awesome, Started using last few days, Have one query…I have all my data in Excel sheets,
    How can I import in andromoney ?
    I have 3 business firms data I use to store in 3 folders having some common account,
    How can use andromoney for making 3 firms account?
    Along with 3 firms I have 4 family savings account s ….
    Can I make all bank accounts in andromoney ?

    Thanks for help in advance

    • There is CSV Export/Import that you can use for this purpose.

      You can create as many accounts as you want. As I said in the blog post above, you can create real or virtual accounts to simulate the categorization you need for your personal and business’s expenses.

    • Hello C V Buty,

      Thank you for choosing AndroMoney! We hear you!

      For the CSV importing, there are some necessary adjustments. Please see the following instruction:

      [How to import CSV data to AndroMoney?]

      1. Enter some transactions on your AndroMoney.

      2. Export the data to a CSV file as a sample. Menu>> Export/ Import>> Export to a CSV file

      3. Open the CSV file by Excel or Google Spreadsheet. And you will need to adjust the old data (the other apps) into the format of AndroMoney. Please be aware of that every item’s format and order must be the same as the sample, including the date/time format (YYYYMMDD).

      4. The file must be saved/named as AndroMoney.csv on Google Docs.

      5. You should be able to import the data to your device.

      And in case you have already put some data in AndroMoney, the previous data will be overwrote by the last one if you only import the new data CSV file. You can combine both before the import in the following steps:

      1. Go to AndroMoney and export the current data as a CSV file.

      2. Use Excel to combine both old and new data and the following steps are same as early mentioned.

      FYI: ID, UID and time information are not necessary. You can leave them blank without affecting data importing.

      Please let us know if there’s any questions. Or You may leave the comment here. Shady and we would love to help you out! 🙂

      Best Regards,
      AndroMoney

    • Hi Peter,
      Sorry for the huge delay, it has been a very busy Q4.

      I didn’t use it with someone else before, but the application has a sync feature that you can use together to sync with the web server.

      However, use this with caution because it wasn’t built for sharing. It is there to be able to view the same data from your phone and also from the web interface.

      Best wishes and Happy new Year!

  • Dear Shady Al Aref!
    I am using Your mobile application Anromoney from long time and found excellent. I want you give excellent rating in google play, but I do not want to show my name and activities at google.

    1 – How can I do that without disclosing my identity.

    2 – You have an option to add budget for main categories. Kindly add option for Sub-Categories also.It will help in the following

    a – Making budget within application (no need to take paper, pencil for making budget). and we can know afterwords how much money was kept for each sub-category that was added in main category budget total and this amount was enough to cover NEED or not.
    b – It will help us to refine and next month budget.

    3 – In accounts section there are 3 types of accounts “Cash, Bank and Credit Card”
    My requirement is one other type of account (Running account). I want to give you an example below maybe you get my point with this

    (e.g) we had kept $2800 for Grocery and this money is with my wife.
    some time she want some items and she gives me $500 from grocery budget. I purchase items for $100 But still I have $400 balance with me in my pocket. next days she asked other item so I purchase from the remaining $400.

    So I want to track expanse from this $500 amount and when next time she gives me $200 additional also from same grocery budget($2800).
    As this money is coming to me from Grocery Budget and not from salary or credit card or saving. therefore it not increasing my income.

    Therefore I gave it name as “running account.” How can it is possible?

    I am sorry I wrote too much. and thank you very much for reading and time.

    If add this option in your application. It will be PERFECT.
    I think Bar-code scanning can not be added because shops use different method of codding while printing their bills.

    Thanks

    Abdur Rauf

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