Managing your money effectively in today's unstable financial landscape is a must if you want to dodge major losses. Tracking incomes, expenses, savings, and investments is crucial, with budgeting playing an important part in all this.
You should always track such happenings and plan well ahead of what your financial situation is right now because you never know what big surprise expense might be around the corner, derailing your important life plans.
In this article, we’ll dive into a FOSS personal finance app for Android that packs some handy tools to help you take control of your money.
My Expenses: A Personal Finance App
Backed by an active community of open source developers and users, My Expenses is a Kotlin + Java application that helps users keep track of their finances in a straightforward, privacy-focused manner.
I tested it on an Android 12 smartphone by setting up a fictitious cash account and adding some bogus transactions to it for the month of December 2024.
When I first launched the app, I was taken through a simple onboarding process where I could tweak the interface, choose whether to enable automatic backups or encryption for the database, and create a new account.
I created a “FOSS Bank A/c” cash account with a balance of $100,000 (there are other currency options) and gave it a green accent color.
I then started adding some new transactions to my account, where I started with a $500 donation to a charity by clicking on the plus button. Here, I entered the transaction as a debit entry (the red button), entered the amount, picked the date/time, added the payee details, included a helpful note, and selected the category for it.
If you notice above, I created a new category with a custom symbol to categorize this specific expense. I must say, the symbol library is huge, making transaction organization much easier when paired with the relevant categories.
I could also add attachments or take a new photo for transactions to better track any receipts received for it.
Sadly, many interesting features of My Expenses are locked behind a paywall. I checked out three of those from the three-dot menu (top-right) with the opt-in free 60-day trial.
First up was “Budgeting”, which allowed me to create custom budgets for specific types of transaction categories, payees, and methods.
Next was “Distribution”, which is hands down my pick among the three, as it shows a cool-looking pie chart that gave me an overview of my finances, arranged neatly with a table at the top.
Finally, I checked out “History”, which showed me an informative bar graph showing me a timeline of the current balance, expenditure, and revenue numbers.
Even though I mostly tested out the local features, there is an optional cloud synchronization feature that works with SAF, Dropbox, OneDrive, and WebDAV, but these are all locked behind the paid plans.
Similarly, there are many other features that are inaccessible, like unlimited accounts, recurring transactions, automated backups, and more. For access to all of those, users have to sign up for paid options like Contrib Key, Extended Key, and Professional Key.
GnuCash can easily load up exported QIF files from My Expenses. Just be sure to check the data thoroughly.
If you use a desktop finance app like GnuCash or Grisbi, then you can export your My Expenses data to such apps in the QIF format.
And if you venture into the settings menu for My Expenses, you will find that it gives you a lot of control over the data, with things like currencies, categories, exchange rate providers, etc. all being configurable.
Install My Expenses
You can find the latest release for My Expenses on F-Droid and the Play Store. For the source code and instructions on how to build it manually, you can visit the GitHub repo.
Sourav Rudra
