Review of Money Manager 365 Budgeting App

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I will review the Money Manager 365 budgeting app. This is part of a series where I give my thoughts on a variety of apps for financial budgeting. 

Money Manager 365 is an app that is available both for iOS and Android platforms.  It does not have a website component, but you can sync multiple devices.  I should say at the outset that this app doesn’t not link with your bank or credit card accounts, so it is manual entry only. Perhaps because of this, Money Manager 365 offers most of its services for free — you can upgrade to a Pro (or VIP) account, which gives you the ability to sync more than 2 devices and get rid of ads for just less than $1 per month. 

Everyone has their own way that works best for them for budgeting. I am partial to apps that automatically link to your accounts and pull in transactions as they occur. Otherwise, I think it is easy to miss things. However, I know that other people rely on manual entry in order to keep themselves accountable and think more carefully about the money they are spending.

For the most part, I found Money Manager 365 to be straightforward and easy to use particularly when it came to setting up accounts and entering transactions.  I have issue with the budget interface, but we will get to that in a minute.

First, it’s a good thing this app is pretty straightforward, because they don’t give you much handholding. When you open up the app, you are faced with a blank transaction screen with no title. Looking at the drop-down menu, You can see screens for chart, accounts, categories, budget, and settings. The chart screen gives you access to some rudimentary reporting, but that is not at all clear initially – once you put in some transactions, you get a better idea of how these reports are useful.

The first thing you’ll need to do is enter a couple of accounts. Everything is manual as I said before, so adding an account is as easy as putting in a name and an opening balance. Next, you will set up your budget categories. Money manager 365 offers some default categories, But it is extremely easy to edit these to categories that work better with your life and spending habits. Just a note that Money Manager 365 does not have any budget groups — just individual budget items. Once you have all of your categories set up, you can start to enter transactions.

This is also pretty straightforward. Almost too straightforward? Hitting the plus sign brings you to a new transaction screen. The date is preselected, so you have to tap to change it. You can set a default account in the settings, so you won’t have to change that frequently either. After that, choosing a category is very simple – just tap on the appropriate one and enter an amount.  Entering a memo or remark requires another tap.  There doesn’t seem to be a field for vendor or a way to split categories — you can put in two transactions if you need to split.  So, that is extremely easy, which is great since you won’t be importing any transactions in automatically.

What I found someone baffling was the budgeting screen. The first time you access it, you are presented with an empty screen. Pushing the + in the upper right hand corner brings you to a new budget screen. What I figured out through trial and error, is that you will need to enter each of your budget category lines separately and assign each one a budgeted amount. However, you can make the date ranges for each budget line item different AND You can include one or multiple categories per budget line. I find this massively confusing, but I guess maybe you can get used to it?  I found myself wanting some help documentation on this process, or a video explaining how budgets could be set up, but the videos money manager 365 has published are equally confusing since they are set to music with no verbal explanation and go through the screens too quickly for easy comprehension (even for someone like me, who is a budgeting app veteran).  I was not able to find any help documentation online either.  In any case, since each budget line item is it’s own separate report, it is difficult to see your overall budget for this month compared to last month without having to go back and adjust the date range for each individual line item. In addition, there does not seem to be a way to roll unused money over from month to month.  It is simply a reporting mechanism rather than a full fledged budgeting tool.

I like this app in that the process for entering transactions is straightforward and requires very few clicks.  Although I am baffled by the budget reporting, it seems flexible enough so that you could set it up to give you some helpful information.  Money manager 365 also gives you the ability to export your transactions into a CSV file, so that you can slice and dice your data anywhere you want.

I’d love to know what you think. Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.