lovemoney.com's MoneyTrack iPhone app is now live!
Keeping track of your money on the move has never been easier. The lovemoney.com MoneyTrack iPhone app is now available to download from iTunes, absolutely free of charge.
What is MoneyTrack?
MoneyTrack is a way to view all of your bank and credit card accounts in a single place. If you have a current account with Santander, an ISA with Halifax and a credit card from Barclaycard, it can be tricky – and time consuming – keeping track of your overall money situation. There’s also all the different security codes, passwords and memorable dates to keep on top of.
MoneyTrack aggregates all of that account information into a single place. MoneyTrack allows you to see not only the various account balances, but also analyse those balances, keep track of your spending behaviour and perhaps spot a few ways to save some cash.
The MoneyTrack app
Up to now, that service has been limited to the lovemoney.com website. That’s all changed with the launch of the MoneyTrack iPhone app, the first UK mobile app of its kind.
Existing MoneyTrack users will be invited to log on as usual. If you’ve not used MoneyTrack before, you’ll be asked to set up a username and password.
New and existing users will then be invited to create a four digit passcode. You’ll be asked to enter this each time you log on to the MoneyTrack app.
Once your passcode is set, you’ll need to set a security question. You can choose from a selection of different questions, including:
- What’s your mother’s maiden name?
- What was your first pet’s name?
- Name of the street you first lived on?
- Where was your first holiday?
- What did you want to be when you grew up?
Existing MoneyTrack users will be met with a summary of their various account balances like this:
New users can add accounts by clicking the Settings tab in the bottom right of the screen, then the Add accounts option and following the on-screen instructions.
If you click on any account, you’ll get a breakdown of recent transactions that looks like this:
You can click on each individual transaction and give it a category, to help you keep track of your spending behaviour. So, to give you an example, I’ve categorised the expense below – a trip to the zoo – as entertainment.
Those individual categories are then placed within four ‘super categories’: Income, Bills, Spent and Savings. So in my example above, the transaction will go into my Spent category. You can view these supercategories in a couple of different ways: bubbles, pie or bar charts. Here’s a look at what the bubbles looks like:
You can even tweak what they show you, whether it’s your balance in the month to date, the previous month or even the day before.
Why the iPhone?
At the moment the app is only available through iTunes, so if you don’t have an iPhone or iPad unfortunately you’ll need to stick to using MoneyTrack via lovemoney.com.
We’ve gone with the iPhone first for the simple reason that far more iPhone users browse the lovemoney.com site than any other mobile platform. However, the app has been designed in such a way that it can be smoothly transitioned over to Android and Windows phones. Apps for those phones will be coming soon.
What’s next?
As well as making the app available to other phone models, work is already underway on v2 of the MoneyTrack app.
Things to look out for include:
- Product recommendations based on your habits
- Alerts. So if there’s a £500 purchase made on your credit card, you’ll receive a text message, just in case it’s a fraudulent transaction.
- Added functionality to the categories
To download the MoneyTrack app, just follow this link.