Emma - Budget Planner Tracker 4+

Love it!

I am really enjoying this app. I am someone who spends too much time thinking and planning my budget on paper, across excel sheets and monitoring multiple accounts. My method was so complicated only I understood it and trying to explain it to my spouse was impossible. This app puts a large portion on that information in one place in a user friendly format that my spouse doesn't need a codex to decipher. I do have some suggestions that would improve this amazing app even more. Planning ahead is a big part of my budget task. It would be great if you could plan your weekly/monthly budgets ahead of time in the analytics section. Being able to input my planned budget for each category 8 weeks/2months ahead would be a game changer as i currently still have to write these plans out on paper and then input these into the app when the cycle refreshes. Paying of debt is my first motivation behind my financial planning. It would be incredible to see some kind of debt tracker in the app. Having something that can show my debt decreasing (hopefully) over time would be really motivating and if its increasing, helping to understand where im going wrong.

Also, i use Monese bank as my primary spending account. Would be great to be able to live sync that account. Monese is currently not an option

Missing some key features/capabilities

I moved to this from my previous personal finance tool that had gone EOL. I like the connection to your bank accounts and the automation it provides. UI is not overly intuitive, takes some time to work out where things are but once you work it out it’s fine. Some things I’d like to see added/addressed are 1) receipt photo cropping. 2) Renaming payees is buggy, doesn’t remember renaming when syncing from bank. 3) needs a search button for emoji lookups in category management. 3) doesn’t track mortgage interest or loan interest. 4) limited account types 5) can’t add notes to regular transactions 6) linking online accounts and offline accounts is hard to setup, could do with some AI to deal with that. 7) you can’t setup regular income deposits, only regular payments, this is a real pain and stupid. 8) no visibility of roadmap 9) no release notes. 10) Can’t add Merchant info, Can’t create a Merchant until you have traded with a Merchant. 11) Can’t add an item into a budget plan unless you have already traded with Merchant, e.g. annual service on a car, insurance payment, MOT, or any other annual payment.

Dropping my rating to a 3star because the longer I use it the more I’m beginning to not like it, especially as it costs £9.99 per month.

Developer Response ,

Hi iPiddy,

thanks a lot for your review.

If you want to drop us a message in live chat, we can check 2). It would be great if we could take a look and fix this for you. :)

Bad after update

This app was so good. I used to use it daily and I felt in control of my money. The recent update to v3 has been terrible. A lot of the basic functionality has been lost. It’s just a basic budgeting tool now, you set up categories and it adds transactions at random to them (and doesn’t take into account pending transactions). Best feature was pulling all your accounts/transactions together and giving you a “global” view but it doesn’t do this properly anymore. I wouldn’t recommend.

In response to the unhelpful reply from the developer. I am not saying features have been removed but functionality has. Pending transactions used to appear in category totals on an analysis tab before the update. This tab now doesn’t exist (this is even clear from the new screenshots) and pending transactions aren’t included in the budget totals anymore. This isn’t helpful for giving an accurate total as sometimes it takes a few days for these to finalise. You used to be able to see account balances on the main page of the app, these are now hidden a few clicks away. Most useless feature of being able to set up transfers within the app now has its own tab though. Please look at the other reviews I’m not alone in thinking this. Going in the chat isn’t going to being this stuff back.

I wouldn’t recommend anyone download this app in its current form.

Developer Response ,

Hi benlhope, we're sorry to hear you're not enjoying the latest design of Emma. In regards to pending transactions, the way these interact with your budget have not changed - in both designs of Emma, pending transactions were not counted towards your spending until they became non-pending. If you're instead referencing the Committed Spending feature that shows you upcoming subscriptions and counts them towards your budget before they're charged, this feature remains - you can find this under 'This Month' or 'This Period' on your Feed tab.