Spentable: Track Your Expenses Quickly and Easily [Giveaway]

You buy a cup of coffee every morning, and you probably think it doesn’t amount to much. How much does it really add up to during the course of a month? Then you make a bunch of impulse buys. It really adds up and those coffees and impulse buys may have tipped you over the edge of your monthly budget…but it’s too late! You only notice the cost is significant afterwards!

It’s usually the reason we don’t have much money left towards the end of the month and when “tax season” is approaching we ask ourselves, “Where did my money go?“

Enter Spentable.

Let’s take a look to see how Spentable can help us to track expenses. It’s available on Android and iOS. The basic version is free and there is a pro version that provides many more features.

Spentable has some pre-created categories for your spending. The default categories are food, transport social and retail. To record what you have spent, simply select the category and type in the amount. This makes it simple to segregate your spending into different areas. It shows you how much you have spent and how much you have left in your monthly budget. Before you make a purchase, add it into the app and you can see if you will go over budget.

Customize and adjust your budget

Do you have extra categories that you want to add or want to adjust the amount of your monthly budget? Press the “cog” in the top right corner and from there you can create new categories and set the budget. You can even export the data to a file and send it by email to use elsewhere. (Note: These options are only available in the pro version.)

Track your history

To see an overview of your spending, press the button on the top left and it switches to a list view, detailing everything that you have spent. Made a mistake in one of your entries? You can delete it by swiping across the incorrect entry and you will be given a delete button to remove it. At the bottom, your total spending for that month is displayed. You can scroll through the months to look back at your spending habits.

Spentable is a convenient, in-your-pocket app that helps you to track your expenses and make purchasing decisions. Spentable helps you to see how your spending is distributed so that you can rebalance if necessary. And because it’s an app, it can always be in your pocket — making it easy to form a habit to track your spending.

We’re giving out free copies of the pro versions of  Spentable for Android and iPhone to the first 30 people who register using the following form:

And if you miss out on the pro version, give the free one a try. It very well could be the app that saves you time — and money.

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Get Back on Track

People trying to get healthy and fit all around the country are feeling guilty today after indulging way too much on Thanksgiving — and if you’re outside the U.S., you’ve had this experience on holidays of your own.

You had a great feast, but you feel like you overdid it. And you feel guilty as hell, and you feel like crap.

Toss all those feelings out. And get the hell off your ass and back on track.

I indulge myself nearly every holiday, and feel guilty too — for about a minute. Then I realize that guilt does nothing to get me fitter. I realize the only thing that will get me fitter is eating healthy today — yesterday doesn’t matter — and being active and working out today.

Here’s why yesterday doesn’t matter: one day of overeating makes almost no difference over the long term. And the long term is what really matters, isn’t it? Are we trying to be healthy and fit on one day, or for a lifetime? Over a lifetime, one day means nothing, but what you do on the vast majority of days is what counts.

And so stop the guilt-fest, stop the worrying, and start eating right. Today. Start working out … today.

If you’ve been doing great, that one day was just a day of fun, and you deserve it. Get back on track, and you’ll be great.

If you haven’t been doing great, and you overdid it, you should now have more than enough fuel to start exercising today. Go for a walk, and enjoy the outdoors. Play a sport with family. Do some pushups, squats and lunges instead of sitting around all day. It doesn’t matter what you do, but start moving.

Yesterday came and went, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Today, you will rock. Today, you are the master of your fitness.

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7 Tools to Help Keep Track of Habits and Goals

Now that 2011 is well underway and most people have fallen off the bandwagon when it comes to their New Year’s resolutions (myself included), it’s a good time to step back and take an honest look at our habits and the goals that we want to achieve.

Something that I have learned over the past few years is that if you track something, be it your eating habits, exercise, writing time, work time, etc. you become aware of the reality of the situation. This is why most diet gurus tell you to track what you eat for a week so you have an awareness of the of how you really eat before you start your diet and exercise regimen.

Tracking daily habits and progress towards goals is another way to see reality and create a way for you clearly review what you have accomplished over a set period of time. Tracking helps motivate you too; if I can make a change in my life and do it once a day for a period of time it makes me more apt to keep doing it.

So, if you have some goals and habits in mind that need tracked, all you need is a tracking tool. Today we’ll look at 7 different tools to help you keep track of your habits and goals.

Joe’s Goals is a web-based tool that allows users to track their habits and goals in an easy to use interface. Users can add as many goals/habits as they want and also check multiple times per day for those “extra productive days”. Something that is unique about Joe’s Goals is the way that you can keep track of negative habits such as eating out, smoking, etc. This can help you visualize the good things that you are doing as well as the negative things that you are doing in your life.

Joe’s Goals is free with a subscription version giving you no ads and the “latest version” for $12 a year.

Daytum is an in depth way of counting things that you do during the day and then presenting them to you in many different reports and groups. With Daytum you can add several different items to different custom categories such as work, school, home, etc. to keep track of your habits in each focus area of your life.

Daytum is extremely in depth and there are a ton of settings for users to tweak. There is a free version that is pretty standard, but if you want more features and unlimited items and categories you’ll need Daytum Plus which is $4 a month.

If you are the spreadsheet number cruncher type and the thought of using someone else’s idea of how you should track your habits turns you off, then creating your own Excel/Numbers/Google spreadsheet is the way to go. Not only do you have pretty much limitless ways to view, enter, and manipulate your goal and habit data, but you have complete control over your stuff and can make it private.

What’s nice about spreadsheets is you can create reports and can customize your views in any way you see fit. Also, by using Dropbox, you can keep your tracker sheets anywhere you have a connection.

I must admit, I am an Evernote junky, mostly because this tool is so ubiquitous. There are several ways you can implement habit/goal tracking with Evernote. You won’t be able to get nifty reports and graphs and such, but you will be able to access your goal tracking anywhere your are, be it iPhone, Android, Mac, PC, or web. With Evernote you pretty much have no excuse for not entering your daily habit and goal information as it is available anywhere.

Evernote is free with a premium version available.

Springpad is another tool that is anywhere you have an internet connection. Although Springpad isn’t necessarily created to keep track of goals and habits, it can be manipulated like Evernote to allow for this type of tracking. In Springpad you could set up a notebook called “Goals” or “Daily Habits” and then add a note for each day outlining the things that you have accomplished.

Springpad only has a free version.

If you like the idea of creating your own tracker via Excel or Numbers, you may be compelled to get even more creative with database tools like Access for Windows or Bento for Mac. These tools allow you to set up relational databases and even give you the option of setting up custom interfaces to interact with your data. Access is pretty powerful for personal database applications, and using it with other MS products, you can come up with some pretty awesome, in depth analysis and tracking of your habits and goals.

Bento is extremely powerful and user friendly. Also with Bento you can get the iPhone and iPad app to keep your data anywhere you go.

You can check out Access and the Office Suite here and Bento here.

All these digital tools are pretty nifty and have all sorts of bells and whistles, but there are some people out there that still swear by a notebook and pen. Just like using spreadsheets or personal databases, pen and paper gives you ultimate freedom and control when it comes to your set up. It also doesn’t lock you into anyone else’s idea of just how you should track your habits.

I can’t necessarily recommend which tool is the best for tracking your personal habits and goals, as all of them have their quirks. What I can do however (yes, it’s a bit of a cop-out) is tell you that the tool to use is whatever works best for you. I personally keep track of my daily habits and personal goals with a combo Evernote for input and then a Google spreadsheet for long-term tracking.

What this all comes down to is not how or what tool you use, but finding what you are comfortable with and then getting busy with creating lasting habits and accomplishing short- and long-term goals.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He studies MIS and Computer Science at Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilized technology to get more and better things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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