Review of Saru Personal Finance and Budgeting App

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel, and in today’s video I will provide a review of the Saru Personal Finance and Budgeting App. This is part of a series where I review budget apps.

The Saru app is a free budgeting system that is available on iOS, Android, and believe it or not, PC software. Based on the way this app looks, I’m guessing it started out as a Microsoft mobile app. There is extremely limited information about it online, so I don’t know the history, but that’s what the interface looks like to me. In addition, you can sync between devices through a Microsoft login (another giveaway).  It has some ads, which you can get rid of by paying a nominal one time fee. I think it’s around two dollars.  The ads are not really a big deal, but a couple times I got into situations where I could not get rid of the ad without killing the app.

In addition to having a throwback interface, Saru embraces a more traditional budgeting philosophy than some of the other envelope-based apps on the market.  I’ll talk more about that in a minute.

OK – so all of that sounded a little dismissive, but Saru has a pretty nice set of features. Particularly for a free app. I figured most of it out as I was working with it, but some of the screen organizational structure is still a bit of a mystery to me. 

After you logon for the first time, you will see that there are five screens represented by icons down at the bottom of the screen: accounts, reports, recurring transactions, regular transactions, and budget. Let’s go through these one at a time.

Accounts

This is pretty straightforward and you can add as many accounts as you want.  On the screen you can see your accounts, BUT you have to go to a different place in order to add or edit them. Pull down the menu and click on accounts to do that. This is what I meant before when I said it had a confusing/complicated organization structure. One thing I particularly like about this app is its use of colorful pictograms or icons. You can see that I chose some icons to represent each of my accounts. You can do this for budget items as well. Next let’s talk about

Reports

Again, this is the dashboard for your reports, but in order to configure them, you’ll have to go to a different place.  Pull down the menu and select reports to configure. I actually think this series of reports is fairly robust and helpful with actual versus forecasted income and expenses, a breakdown of your spending by budget category, and your income and expense balance for the year.  In the configure screen you can change the settings to produce either a bar or a pie chart and you can change the date range and the way that it groups spending.  Next,

Transactions

At the heart of every budgeting app is entering transactions. If this is hard to do, the budget app is just not worth using. Fortunately, Saru makes this process pretty easy. There are two different kinds of transactions. Regular transactions and recurring transactions.  The difference is obvious, But note that there are two different entry screens for each. For regular transactions, the process is straightforward.  Here, where it tells you to tap to select a category, you will be presented with a list of the default budget categories that Saru automatically populates.  To change these, go to the drop-down menu and choose Categories.  This took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out!  It is quick and easy to add, edit, or delete a budget item. One of my favorite things about this app is the ability to add a picture or icon to a budget category. This makes the process so much faster when you are entering transactions.

To enter a recurring transaction, go to the recurring transactions dashboard and hit the +.  It looks more or less the same, but you also have to add a recurrence frequency and number of times that it will occur.  This is a nice feature for things like rent, car payments, and other items that are the same amount and happen each month or quarter. In addition, you can see there is a calendar view to see the payments that are coming up. This gives you a time visualization of when payments are due. You can see the icon on the day of the month and if you scroll down, you can see the transaction itself. This is a really nice feature.  The last screen is for

Budgets

As I said before, you set up budget items in the category menu.  Saru allows you to set up groups of budget items, but I couldn’t see too much point in this.  You’ll have to see how this works for you.  First click on the + in order to add some budget items. As I said earlier, this is not an envelope system. It is a traditional budget system where you are simply reporting on spending versus the budget goals that you have sent previously. You can set each budget line item for weekly, monthly, annually, or other preset time frames. I don’t love the screen. The budget line items are so big that you need to scroll down practically a full screen to see the next item. There is no click through to see transactions for a budget category. Monthly and weekly and other frequencies are all thrown in together. And you can’t sort the screen manually. Instead, it seems to be sorted by the order of entry.  Just a couple of

Other Items

Saru does not seem to have the ability to split a transaction. You will have to do two transactions if that spending falls into 2 budget groups. It does have a really nice export function. You cannot export transactions from a specific budget item, but you can select a date range to apply to the export. I could not seem to find a search function for transactions. Unfortunately, this is a dealbreaker for me – I have way too many transactions to go through one at a time.

I’m sure if I had downloaded the PC software, some of the visual issues that I had with the app would be resolved, but I just could not bring myself to install a piece of software on my computer like it was 1995.  I was surprised to not find much in the way of training or help online considering how robust this app seems to be. In the end, aside from the inability to search, I think this app has all of the makings of a robust financial reporting app as long as you can figure out the byzantine navigation!

Let me know what you think. Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.