JabpLite:Track Your Expenses from Mobile

Jul 7, 2010 by Shivendu Madhava

An easy way to track your expenses

Ever have trouble figuring out where exactly you are spending your hard-earned cash? You got your salary last week and your bank account is already depleted. Where did all that money go?

In the current economic scenario, wallets have become lighter and the situation is always a little tight. It has become quite pertinent to know where one spends one’s money and keep a track of one’s expenditures. Well, it is a good practice to have regardless, but more so at the moment.

So what’s the one item that can take textual input, is easy to carry and you usually have with you at all times? Ah, the smart phone is such a wonderful piece of technology. Oh, and those who said ‘pen and paper’ should go stand in a corner. Right now. No, really!

As noted earlier, not all phones come with a built-in office suite that you can use a spreadsheet software for this activity. And it would be quite insane to buy a whole pocket office suite for just this.

Programmer Malcolm Bryant was apparently in the same fix. So he decided to create his own little application to track his expenses and called it JabpLite.

Compatible with almost any mobile phone out there, the program is surprisingly robust and very easy to use.

Each new entry you make is a simple process. Choose ‘New Transaction’ and in the first field box, type the description of the activity you just spent your money on (for example: food shopping).

The next box provides an entry for the amount spent. Users will be glad to know that there is not any currency prefixed to the number — seeing a dollar sign in some of such free applications has been a particular source of irritation for some of us.

Following the amount, you can choose to either credit or debit it to your account. The credit clause is quite handy in case someone had borrowed money and pays it back, helping you easily keep a track.

In the transaction entry, you can also add a particular reference to the item. So for ‘food’, you could key in ‘bought apples and oranges’.

Once you are done filling in the requisite information, click on ‘Save as Regular’.

Your virtual accounting books can be segregated into six sections: Accounts, Transactions, Categories, Standing Orders, Investments and Currencies.

Transactions is the one aspect we found ourselves using a lot, especially as it is gives a very detailed account of one’s spending habits. And if you are like us, the huge numbers in the column for expenditures on frivolous gadgets and games will be an eye-opener!

The Accounts section was also quite useful, helping know the kind of savings we had left as it subtracted our credit card amount from what our bank account holds.

The great part about JabpLite is that it also has a desktop utility that can sync up with your mobile phone. The mother program, JabP, runs on both Windows and Mac and can export and import transactions from JabpLite. And yes, JabP is free too and available at the same site!

Platforms: Blackberry, all Java phones

Price: Free

Download: www.freepoc.org