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Image: Screenshot from Dollarbird.co

Have trouble keeping an integrated view of your monthly finances, planning ahead or even keeping finances from being pain points between you and your roommate? No matter where you are in this equation, here are three apps that will help you manage your money better.

Splitwise

Love your roomie but will go to any lengths to avoid that nagging conversation about splitting petty home expenses? Breathe easy because there is an app that splits and tracks payments between roommates, friends, co-workers or anyone. Splitwise, an app designed for Android and iOS, and available via third-party apps to Windows phone users, makes the whole affair literally technical.

Using Splitwise, you can create groups with each persons IOU standing showing next to their names. It’ll give you a snapshot of total money owed ‘to’ and ‘by’ you as well as a breakup of running expenses under different cost heads. For the record, you can even upload pictures of the bill to each cost header. Once reminders are set, the app will notify each stakeholder when the bills are due. Each group member can also manually send “friendly” reminders to those who generally pay in late.

Paypal is one of the payment options but good old-fashioned cash exchange would likely be the way to go in India.

Dollarbird

Dollarbird is an app that helps you monitor your bank balance between two dates. The app starts with your opening balance. All subsequent expenditures are subtracted from and incoming bills added to this amount. Each time you make an expenditure entry, you can put them under pre-designed category icons that you can rename and colour code. And within each category, say ‘Food’, you can add specific expenditure heads. At any given point of time, the app will give you a snapshot of how your account balance is faring on an everyday and month-to-month basis, serving as a great expense-planning tool.

Dollarbird, initially designed for iOS, has only recently come to Android. It also has a paid Pro version, but the free basic version would suffice for most.

You Need a Budget (YNAB)

YNAB has been designed to help you essentially rewire your spending habit so you don’t live from pay-check to pay-check but reach a place where you use this month’s income to pay the next month’s expenses. This it helps you do through three main ways: “give every dollar a job” so you spend it on something you didn’t plan for, save for big annual expenses and bunch them by month and plan for contingent expenses. For further aid and inspiration, users can also access their online tutorials and live budgeting classes.

This app for home-level fiscal discipline is available on both iOS and Android, but requires it to be downloaded to your desktop too if you are on Android.