Managing money using digital budgeting - Diana Clement

Digital apps are helping people with their budgeting. Photo / 123RF

OPINION:

A cluster of new and updated budgeting apps have launched in New Zealand. They’re making managing money easier than ever before.

New apps BudgetBuddie, and SortMe, join established offerings PocketSmith, and MyBudgetPal. A third new app, Zaak, has been bought by budget service Christians Against Poverty (CAP), and it’s not yet clear if it will be available to the public, or just for CAP clients.

Plenty of New Zealanders use overseas budgeting apps, such as Fudget and Spendee, as well as good old-fashioned spreadsheets. Westpac, Revolut and Savvy offer decent budgeting built into their accounts.

The first advantage of independent New Zealand-based budgeting apps is that customers can access all their banks, not just one. Secondly, once connected, the new apps all import bank transactions automatically at login, without the need for manual uploads. BudgetBuddie, PocketSmith and SortMe use local start-up Akahu in the background to access feeds from banks and multiple financial institutions such as Sharesies, Hatch, Latitude [Gem Finance], NZ Home Loans and quite a few others. MyBudgetPal uses US-based Yodlee currently for feeds.

For this article, I signed up with all the current crop apart from Zaak. The aim was to get a feel for them, not review every feature.

I have trialled many budgeting apps over the years and from experience, I know the “best” one is the one that works for you and you keep using. I like good visual pie charts and reporting on where my money has gone for that month. For others, it’s seeing how they’re faring day in and day out against individual categories in that month’s budget. Some users want to slice and dice their finances and make future projections.

I know people who love smartphone-based apps such as BudgetBuddie. It suits people with simple finances who need to set up a budget and make sure they don’t overspend.

At the other end of the scale is PocketSmith, which is very flexible and allows users to dig deep into their data. It has been around for 12 years, but recently moved its bank and financial service connections in the background to Akahu.

PocketSmith’s list of features is very long indeed. I especially love that you can create custom categories and exclude certain types of expenses. Since I last used PocketSmith it has added features such as customisable dashboards, so you can visualise your data in a way that best suits you, financial adviser access, and all manner of reporting.

The new apps BudgetBuddie and SortMe proved very good at auto classifying transactions, which saved hours of set up and manual classifying. PocketSmith and MyBugetPal have also improved in that area.

I liked that SortMe has both a smartphone app and an extremely simple-to-use desktop version that allows users to view their finances in a way that is meaningful for them. It is also using AI to make financial suggestions and identify potential savings. It can import bills from email, which is handy. The daily emails help keep users honest with themselves.

All of these apps have many more nifty features than I have room to point out. A good way to try out multiple apps is to set up connections in Akahu first, which can be used again and again with the different apps - excluding MyBudgetPal.

MyBudgetPal is the only tool that is free. The others have to charge money to survive. MyBudgetPal is owned by KiwiSaver provider Booster, which plays the long game, hoping budgeting with the company might encourage users to buy funds.

There is one big but currently. The five big banks all tell me that Akahu and Yodlee’s services breach their terms and conditions that say customers can’t share their passwords with third parties. The ironies of that are twofold. First, many of the banks use scraping in their own supply chains, then ban customers from using the same technology. Secondly, Westpac part owns Akahu, at the same time as ordering customers not to use it.

UK banks are forced by law to share their data with customers. New Zealand banks are dragging the chain. That is about to change with Open Banking nearly here.

Finally, the Akahu feeds are also used by other services such as Kubera, which is a handy net worth app that allows users to track everything from their bank accounts to crypto assets and global stock portfolios. Payments app Dolla also uses the Akahu feed.