The latest smartphone apps have made monitoring spending habits, tracking expenses and managing money a breeze.
A monthly expense tracker app automates the process of recording transactions, totaling expenses by category and tracking progress toward goals. While there are many resourceful apps available, the best tools are the ones you actually use.
“We’ve found our most successful customers have a habit of sitting down and looking at their finances for (at least) five minutes a week,” says Kristen Dillard, chief product officer for Quicken, a publisher of personal finance software. An app makes it easy to do just that.
In the past, the free app Mint was arguably the most popular option for tracking expenses and budgeting. Intuit discontinued it in 2024, so here are the current top picks for the best expense tracker apps for personal and business use.
1. EveryDollar
Cost: $17.99 per month or $79.99 per year for an annual subscription to EveryDollar premium.
Top feature: Drag-and-drop feature that makes it easy to organize your budget.
Best for: Zero-based budgeting adherents.
EveryDollar is one of the many products and services offered by personal finance guru Dave Ramsey. It espouses a zero-based budgeting system in which users “give every dollar a job.” The app automatically pulls transactions from your financial accounts and lets you split them across multiple budget categories.
EveryDollar’s Paycheck Planning feature helps users with irregular incomes budget by letting them enter paydays and plan expenses around those dates.
The free version lets you create a customizable budget and set up savings funds. To access the app’s most powerful features — like bank connectivity, group financial coaching, and detailed budget reports — you’ll need the paid premium version.
2. Simplifi
Cost: $5.99 per month; 50% off at time of publication ($2.99 per month).
Top feature: Tags that allow you to track expenses across multiple categories.
Best for: Those who want a feature-rich and ad-free budgeting app.
Offered by Quicken, Simplifi bundles a collection of user-friendly tools that make it easy to track expenses, plan spending and save for goals.
“It does everything from download your transactions to help you create a budget to run reports,” Dillard says.
For those who find a traditional budget too rigid, Simplifi has other features to help them manage money. “We tried to make it so the app would be more fluid,” Dillard adds.
Simplifi will create a spending plan based on a user’s transactions, but it also has a watch list feature for those who only want to track specific expenses, such as Target purchases or dining out.
The app automatically categorizes expenses, and users can adjust categories or create rules to organize incoming transactions. Using tags makes it easy to total spending across categories and track, for example, how much went to a vacation or a child’s extracurricular activities.
3. SupportPay
Cost: Free for two receipt uploads and three expenses per month. Premium features, including unlimited expenses and receipts, cost $8.33 a month for a single user or $12.99 a month for a family plan when billed annually. Month-to-month plans cost $14.99 and $19.99 per month, respectively.
Top feature: Automated, certified record of expenses for tax, court or other purposes.
Best for: Parents who do not live together but share expenses for children.
Caregivers, such as adult children sharing expenses for an elderly parent, can also use SupportPay. Users upload or photograph receipts to share with others, make payments directly through the app or record payment history manually.
The app lets users dispute expenses and provide a written explanation for disagreements. Users can export data to create certified records for tax or court purposes.
SupportPay reduces emotional conflicts and increases transparency, making expense sharing clearer and more straightforward. To get the most out of the app, all parties must install and actively use it.
4. Center
Cost: Free.
Top feature: Real-time expense reporting and management.
Best for: Medium-sized businesses.
Center is a free app for businesses that use CenterCard, a corporate credit card. Its founders developed the app after realizing that the traditional system of batch-based expense processing no longer worked for many businesses.
With Center, employees’ transactions on a CenterCard appear immediately in the app. Workers can access transactions from their phones and add any necessary details. The app also integrates with financial software such as QuickBooks and Oracle NetSuite.
Center was designed with medium-sized businesses — those employing 50 to 500 workers — in mind, but can also serve larger companies with 500 to 2,000 employees.
[READ: 10 Simple and Free Budgeting Tools.]
5. Shoeboxed
Cost: Prices range from $9 to $79 per month when paid monthly or around $8 to $66 per month when paid annually.
Top feature: You can fill prepaid envelopes with receipts, mail them in and have Shoeboxed convert them into digital copies.
Best for: Businesses with a significant number of paper receipts.
While many expense tracker apps focus on capturing data from bank accounts, Shoeboxed helps users easily manage physical receipts and other paper documents.
Users can scan receipts themselves or request a Magic Envelope to mail documents to Shoeboxed for scanning. The app generates expense reports and integrates with apps like QuickBooks and Evernote.
Shoeboxed automatically categorizes receipts by vendor, date, total spent and payment type. It also stores IRS?accepted images and related data.
Plans start at $9 per month for 20 physical scans per year and 30 digital scans per month.
[READ: Track and Manage Subscriptions With These Apps.]
6. Expensify
Cost: Free for up to 25 SmartScans per month. Prices for business plans start at $5 per user per month.
Top feature: Option to auto-submit reports for reimbursement.
Best for: Workers who need to track mileage and job expenses for reimbursement or tax purposes.
Expensify makes it easy to scan receipts and capture expense data, and its pricing is more affordable than many alternatives.
For $5 per month, individuals and small business users can scan an unlimited number of receipts. Expensify stores data indefinitely and also tracks mileage.
Group plans offer additional features, including expense approvals and integration with accounting software. Expensify earns strong reviews online, appealing to users who want affordable pricing and GPS-based mileage tracking. The main drawback is that the interface may not be intuitive for all users.
7. Xero
Cost: Regular prices range from $25 to $90 per month. An 85% off promotion is running until March 31.
Top feature: Ability to capture receipts from photos, scans or emails, then reconcile them automatically with your bank.
Best for: Small businesses seeking an easy-to-use, cloud-based solution for financial management.
For small businesses that want more than expense tracking, Xero offers a comprehensive money-management solution. Businesses can handle invoicing, bill payment and reporting all in one place.
Xero syncs with multiple bank accounts, captures expense dates from receipts and emails, and reconciles accounts daily.
The app and website integrate seamlessly with a variety of tools for payroll, payments, time management and more.
Xero offers three monthly plans: $20 for freelancers, self-employed workers, and new businesses; $47 for growing teams; and $80 for full-featured access.
8. Your Banking App
Cost: Free.
Top feature: Banking and expense management in one place.
Best for: Bank customers.
You may have the best expense tracking app on your phone already.
“One of the easiest ways to keep track of your spending is your mobile banking app,” Sonali Divilek, chief marketing and customer officer, card and connected commerce at JPMorganChase, says.
Divilek points to the Snapshot feature within the Chase Mobile app as an example. “(It) provides automated daily insights into your spending and the categories where you’re spending the most, whether that’s groceries, entertainment or shopping.”
Banking apps may also help you track which merchants have your card information on file — a feature particularly useful for monitoring recurring expenses, according to Divilek.
Check with your financial institution to see if it offers an app and what expense-tracking tools it includes.
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8 Best Expense Tracker Apps originally appeared on usnews.com
Update 05/28/26: This story was published at an earlier date and has been updated with new information.
