Visually track your spending against your monthly budget on one simple chart. View your total amount spent and unified transaction history across multiple cards.
I’m beyond excited to launch a brand new app today, Budget Burndown.
The idea is simple. Set a monthly budget, which is plotted on the chart as an expected spending rate. Your actual spending plots against it as the month goes on. If you keep the lines matched up, you stay on budget!
This type of graph is called a burndown chart (hence the app name), which is commonly used in Agile software development.
I built this app for myself long before ever considering launching it publicly. I was frustrated at how complicated and spammy other budgeting apps were, and all I cared about was tracking my transactions across two credit cards. Recurring payments like rent and student loans were always the same, but I had no visibility into how much I was spending day-to-day. Using them all the time at work, I realized that a burndown chart was the perfect solution to this problem.
With Budget Burndown, you can track your overall spending and see all of your transactions across multiple cards in a single list. There are no ads, credit scores, annoying emails, or manual entry. It's completely automatic. There’s no sign up. There's dark mode. There's even a home screen widget!
I hope you love it as much as I do!
- Gavin King
When you first open the app, you'll be asked to link your first card. We recommend that this is the card you use for most of your day-to-day spending, rather than one that large, recurring payments (like rent or student loans) are drawn from.
We use a third-party service called Plaid to interact with the banks, so everything is end-to-end encrypted and your credentials are completely inaccessible to us. We don't want them!
You can link more cards from the Settings menu at any time.
Next, you'll be asked to set a monthly budget. We suggest initially setting this to how much you usually spend on your linked card every month (if it's a credit card, this would be your average statement balance).
You can always change this from the Settings menu if you want to challenge yourself even further.
That's it! No sign up needed.
With a card linked and your monthly budget set, your burndown will automatically populate for the current month.
If your spending line is above the budget line, it means that you've spent more than you should have so far. If it's below, then you've spent less than you could have so far.
The goal is to keep the two lines to matched up throughout the month, which means you're staying on track.
Your burndown will stay up to date automatically. There's no need to add transactions manually. If you do want to exclude a particular transaction, you can tap it and switch "Counts toward budget" off.
If you want at-a-glance visibility into your spending without even opening the app, you can add the home screen widget to show your burndown on your phone's home screen or lock screen.
You can enable whichever custom notifications are useful to you in the Settings menu. Custom notifications include spending alerts (when you went off track, or went back on track) or spending summaries (how much you spent yesterday, last week, etc.).
Sometimes it makes sense to edit a transaction. For example, let's say you're out to dinner with someone, and you pay the bill with your card. If the other person were to pay you back for their half with cash, you could tap the transaction and edit it to reflect only your own half.
Every user is allowed to link one card for free, which is enough for many people. Pro users can link multiple.
Gavin King
iOS 12+
1 month free trial, then $4.99/month