I was never good at managing my expenses.
It’s not that I didn’t believe in the usefulness of logging how my money was spent – I just used to be lazy and disorganized. But I only blame myself partially: in Italy, cash is still widely used, and, occasionally, smaller stores don’t even give you a receipt, which makes it harder to remember an expense later. To make things worse, I was never able to find great expense tracking software that could work with my Italian bank and credit card – all the cool apps are limited to the US, Canada, Australia, or other European countries that aren’t Italy.
Still, I should have found a way to track my expenses earlier, because growing up it became harder to tell my accountant that “I couldn’t remember” how I spent my money. This is obvious, right? I reached the tipping point last year, when my girlfriend and I moved in together and, like tasks, I completely lost track of a side of my business and financials that was too important to ignore.
Earlier this year, I set out to find a good expense tracker that would work on all my devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook) but that wouldn’t be a “companion app” on iOS. Too many finance apps are developed for Mac first and ported to iOS as an afterthought with limited functionality, and I’m not okay with that.1
In March, I started using Next, developed by indie studio noidentity and available on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I’ve refrained from writing about Next not only because I like to take my time with reviews (which is usually the case), but because I believe that an expense tracker needs to fit in your daily habits and prove itself in scenarios that can’t be tested in traditional ways. How can you tell if your expense tracker works while you’re on vacation? You need to go on vacation. Does it work at IKEA while you’re in a hurry at the checkout line and you want to save your expenses quickly? Well, you need to buy some furniture first (which I did).
So I began using Next and I didn’t write about it. I’ve been using the app religiously for the past eight months: this summer, my friends made fun of my obsession with saving expenses while we were on vacation in Sardinia, but I didn’t budge. If I wanted to truly test Next, I needed to stick to it and test its flexibility over time.
Next is on my Home screen on my iPhone and iPad. I use the app every day, and I log every expense (whether it’s cash or an expense from my bank account) as soon as I can. My perspective of my spending habits has considerably changed since I started using Next, and I’m making more informed decisions thanks to the overview that this app offers and its elegant design combined with astounding ease of use.
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