New Year means more fun, celebrations and new resolutions. This guide is specially for those people who set a resolution to save and invest. It might be the inspiration and nudge you need. Saving and investing money starts by managing it, which means keeping a record. This includes every expense such as your Netflix, Amazon Prime and online music service subscriptions. It is important to set realistic and achievable goals. One of the easiest ways is to maintain records is using a written ledger or a simple spreadsheet. This can be time consuming and it is a dated method. Smartphones can simplify daily finance by helping you track them. You can open a bank account, apply for a loan account or even pay money in seconds. This guide recommends apps to simplify job of managing subscriptions and investments along with some level of budgeting.
The first app we recommend is called Subscriptions – Manage your regular expenses. It is a free, easy-to-use Android app that manages your subscriptions.
On launching the app, you are asked to select the default currency.
To add a new entry, click on the ‘+’ button. Enter the subscription details such as monthly or yearly amount, name of the service, description, type of service, billing period and the mode of the payment. Tap the n Save subscription button and repeat the same steps to add more subscriptions. All the subscriptions will appear as labels on the main screen. They can be filtered by name, price or billing date. You can further customize these labels using colours. There are other settings such as ‘Night mode’ for enabling dark theme, a ‘Backup’ option to save a copy of your details on your phone’s storage. There is even a ‘Show the time until the next payment’ feature to display days left for the next payment.
To get notifications of your subscriptions, click on the subscription label and then on the bell icon from the right corner. Click on the create notification option and set notification parameters such as day, time, a short message to notify you.
Artos is another free and interesting Android app. This app is easy-to-use, secure and it helps record all your investments in one place. It keeps a record of your total net worth, gives timely reminders and a complete review. Artos supports approximately 500 stocks, direct and regular mutual funds from major fund houses and Equity Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).
The main screen gives access to Stocks, Mutual Funds, ETFs, SIPs, Fixed Income, Cash and Accounts. To maintain a list of equity stocks, click on the ‘+’ icon to manually add or import existing transactions directly from Excel or Google sheets as CSV transactions. There are certain instructions such as column order, date format and title row that you need to pay attention to before importing your CSV file. This simplifies the process of uploading your portfolio.
If you are adding it manually, select the stock and enter the date, price, unit and choose whether you want to buy or sell. You’ll see labels of all the stocks purchased and sold. Click on the stocks one-by-one to get a detailed overview and their performance through comprehensive graphs. You can also see the current status of mutual funds shareholding and transaction details. The same procedure and instructions are applicable for the next two investment options – Mutual Funds and ETFs. You can add them manually or import directly from Excel or Google sheets as CSV transactions.
Artos gives an overview of trends across mutual fund industry like the stocks held, the most bought and sold stocks. You can have an option to add SIPs by clicking on mutual funds, ‘+’ icon and then on the ‘Restart’ icon. Provide details of SIPs, select if it is an ongoing SIP, start date, frequency and the amount. You can click on the added SIP one-by-one to get a detailed overview. The main screen also has an option to watch the live market, so you can keep an eye on your stock portfolio. You can track several individual portfolios too.
The fixed income section is to keep a record of income through fixed deposits and EPF. To add fixed deposit, click on the ‘+’ icon, enter name, start date, amount, interest rate, type of fixed deposit and tenure. Adding this gives you details such as the interest payout on the amount initiated. You can also add your EPF contributions by importing your EPF passbook or adding EPF details manually. Besides serious traders, Artos can also be used for keeping a track of all your bank accounts, digital wallets and cash. Every time you deposit or withdraw money, you need to manually update it for a record. In the long run, you have a clearer picture of your finances. The Analysis section displays a report of all your assets like stock holdings, cash, bonds, etc. Although a little cumbersome, this determines whether you’re meeting your investment goal or not.
Everyone has a different set of financial goals. If you want to make a fresh start, figure out your total earnings and what you want to do with it. Apps such as Subscription – Manage your regular expenses and Artos are available to help simplify the task of recording your expenses and investments.
