Review of Emma Finance and Budget App

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today’s video I will do a quick review of the Emma finance and budgeting app. This is part of a series where I give my thoughts on a variety of budget systems.

OK – Emma is a personal finance and budget tracker that comes out of the UK. It is available for iOS and android platforms – there is no web app.  They offer a free version which does allow you to automatically link your financial accounts, but upgrading to Emma Pro for $5 per month gives you a bunch of additional features including export, custom budget categories, split transactions, etc.

Signing up for Emma allows you to use your Facebook, Apple ID, or your phone number. The set up process takes you directly into the screen to link an account. This is very easy and straightforward, and as I said before, is available even to free users.  It syncs between devices by storing your data up in a cloud account.  Emma protects your data by requiring you to enter a four digit pin each time you access the app.

Once you have signed up and gone through the quick set up process, you land on the Emma feed screen.  This is supposed to be like your Twitter feed, but it’s really just a series of small reports. Will come back to that in a second. The other screens listed here on the bottom are: Analytics, Save Money, Accounts, and More. Rather than go through each of the screens as Emma presents them, I’m going to pop around the app a bit to make sure that I cover the basic budgeting functions. First, 

Accounts

As I said, you can set up your first linked account during the set up process. But, clicking on the Account screen allows you to set up additional linked financial accounts or to set up an account manually.  In addition to regular spending accounts, you can set up savings accounts in this tab and your investment accounts in this one.  Tapping on the account name brings you to a list of transactions for that account.  You can add transactions for your manual accounts, but only edit transactions for linked accounts.  You can search your transactions from this screen as well.  One of Emma’s nice features is the ability to add color and a pictograph for accounts and budget categories. You can see that Emma has pulled in the Chace logo for my linked credit card account and I’ve chosen a color and an icon to use for my main checking account. Next, let’s set up some

Budget Categories

Emma provides some default categories. If you upgrade to Emma Pro, you can add custom categories.  To see the budget categories, tap on Analytics and then Budgets up here in the upper right hand corner.  I’m picky about the naming of my budget categories, so I would want the ability to add and change them.  Unfortunately, Emma does not allow you to edit or change their default categories, but you can add new ones. Just click on this box that says “you are on Emma pro. Create a custom category”.  From here, you just need to choose a name, color, and icon and done.  You can see that Emma groups all of its default categories together down here and any new categories that I have added are grouped up here alphabetically. Other than these two distinctions, there is no way to custom sort or custom group your budget items.  OK, now that we have some budget categories set up, let’s look at

Transactions

In the Emma app, there are a couple of ways to look at transactions. As Emma pulls transactions in from your financial institutions, the app attempts (reasonably successfully) to automatically determine the budget category. So, within this analytics screen you can tap on a budget category to see the transactions that Emma has tagged for it. In addition, you can click on merchants to see transactions categorized by vendor. Inevitably, Emma will not always tag transactions with the correct budget category. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way to indicate which transactions have been approved by you and which still need to be confirmed or have the budget category changed. Instead, those new transactions are intermingled with old transactions. This is a pet peeve of mine. Probably the best way to go through and make sure everything is categorized properly, is by going into the accounts screen, and clicking on the appropriate account to see transactions listed by date.  From there, you can click on each transaction and check to see if the automatically applied budget category is correct.  If it’s not, just tap on the category quickly choose a new one from this list of colorful icons, and tap “Apply edit to one transaction.”  Emma makes this extremely easy – I particularly like the visuals – however, I am not sure why, makes you click several times when one click could just get you back to the list of transactions. Apparently, Emma has some artificial intelligence that learns your spending habits so that this process will become even more streamlined over time.  Emma imports pending transactions from your financial institutions, but doesn’t let you edit them or change the category, which I find kind of annoying since they are just hanging out there with the wrong category. Pending transactions tend to be an issue for budget apps – you have to choose between two not great options: not importing them until they clear, which creates a delay OR importing them, knowing that they may change or be updated.  In addition to updating the category, you can change the name of a transaction, add a memo, upload a photo (like a picture of a receipt), and add tags. Tags are nice since they give you one additional level of categorization and searching.  Also, noticed that Emma pulls a photo for many of the more popular vendors, making the visualization really appealing. All of these nice visual touches really helped to make the app interactive and easy to use.  For linked accounts you can only edit transactions (can’t delete or add new transactions), but for manual accounts you can add, delete, and edit. OK, now that we have categorized our transactions properly, let’s set up our 

Budget Amounts

Emma is more of a traditional budgeting app, rather than having an envelope budget philosophy. Traditional budgeting means that you plan a budgeted amount for each category and then report actual spending against planned.  Setting this up is pretty easy.  Go into Analytics and click on Budgets.  First, Emma asks you to choose either monthly or payday to payday as the budgeting period.  Emma then allows you to set an overall budgeted amount for that period.  From there, you simply fill in the amounts for each of these budget items. Again, I find myself really wanting to get rid of these extra default categories, but as long as you don’t use them, they are not reported.  There’s no way to change the order of these budget items. They are sorted first by whether the item is a default Emma category or custom and within those groups Emma sorts them alphabetically.  Now we are ready to see the

Budget View

This is the report that shows you how you were doing against your plan. It is right here in the analytic screen. And simply gives a list of spending by category, from highest amount to the lowest amount. Emma gives you a little graphic in this light color to show how much you have spent against your budget and it gives you the amount budgeted, the amount spent, and the amount left. If you click on the budget category, it will bring you to a list of those transactions. Emma does not show a budget category if there is no spend this month. It also gives a total of spending for the budget, but you can’t seem to go to past or future months, you can only see the current month.  So what

Other Reports

Does Emma provide?  Well, this isn’t necessarily a report, but Emma provides a graphic in the accounts screen for your account totals for every day, savings, and investments. You can switch the time period down here.  In the Feed Screen, Emma provides lots of little reports.  This first report shows checking, savings, and debt to give you your net worth. This little tile shows how much you’ve spent this week and allows you to click through to see the transactions that make up that amount.  This next tile shows a pie chart of your total budgeted amount versus how much you have already spent and gives you an idea of what commitments you have coming up.  And finally, this tile allows you to see transactions by vendor plus you can manipulate the time period filter. 

One of the things that differentiates the Emma app from others, is their ability to identify subscriptions – or expenses that recur.  You can see the app shows you this information here. In addition, one of its screens – the Save Money screen — allows you to use this information to lower your bills and analyze your recurring expenses.  They seem to partner with two vendors for the activities on the screen, Billshark.com to lower expenses and Moneavo to lower debt payments.  This could be additional income for the company, or it could be their primary stream.  Just a few

Other Items

The Emma pro version allows you to split transactions for when two budget categories apply to one transaction.  Emma will help to do these calculations for you. The Pro version also allow you to export your transactions.  And there appears to be a reasonable amount of help available for the Emma app. The More screen has links to a community forum and to a support center.

And that’s it!  It’s a colorful, appealing app that has some nice features.  It might be good for you if you are very visual or need help lowering yourself recurring expenses.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.