Pennies is a super elegant and beautiful budget tracking app for iPhone and iPad. The app, made by Emile Bennett, is designed to be a simple way to manage and track your expenses. Pennies helps you create budgets and lets you track your expenses and spends within those budgets. This straightforward approach by Pennies makes it a very effective finance tracking app for your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.
Although Pennies has been available on the App Store for over 6 years now, I only recently came across it when browsing our old archived backups. We’ve never featured the app here on Beautiful Pixels, but we did mention it in one of our early issues of The Platter when Version 2.0 of the app was released. Today, Pennies is at Version 5.7 and has matured incredibly well into a fantastic & elegant personal expense tracker for your iOS device.
Simple Expense Tracking Using Budgets
When you get started with Pennies, you are asked to set up a new budget in the app. Your budget can be as broad or as specific as possible. It can be your monthly Junk Food budget, Yearly services budget, a budget for a one-off event party, or even your payroll. Simply name your budget, choose the budget type (Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, One-Off, or Payroll), pick a start date and currency, the amount you’d like to allocate for this budget, the amount you’re left with in the current period and you’re set. You can now start adding your expenses in Pennies. You can add multiple budgets in the app, and each budget can have its own currency.
Adding your expenses and spends in the app is delightful. You can record your Spends, add your Receivables and even Transfer amounts between budgets. Pennies makes lovely use of typography and simple colors that give it a lovely & elegant look on the screen. I can never get bored looking at these screens.
When adding your expenses, Pennies shows you how much you have left in the budget for today, and how much is left in the current month — so it’s easy to keep track of the overall budget and your spending habits. I have been using the app to track my Food expenses over the last few weeks and it has helped me cut down on unnecessary spends. You can optionally add a note too, but there’s no way to take a photo or attach an existing one. If you’ve forgotten to record expenses in the past, you can pick the date and add them whenever you want.
iPhone Screenshots
Pennies is a Universal app and is just as delightful on the iPad. It syncs your data via iCloud, so all your expenses are always in sync. There’s also support for 3D Touch, and I especially like how you can 3D Touch on the app icon to quickly jump into your last used budgets. For fans of the Today View, there’s also a Today Widget included in the app and a lovely set of sounds for some additional delight.
Apple Watch Screenshots
Pennies also offers a nifty Apple Watch app for times when you want to make use of that fitness device on your wrist to manage your expense. Emile has done a remarkable job in crafting the interface for the watch app, and adding your expenses or checking in on your budget with just a quick glance is just delightful. I especially like how the round buttons and the rounded typography — coupled with the brand colors of Pennies — feel right at home on the App Watch.
Pennies is a remarkable feature-rich expense tracking app for iPhone and iPad, and a nifty companion on Apple Watch. It is available for just $3.99 on the App Store.