Apps: It's All About Money

Cashing In With Cashe
An android app that joins a few others in the space, CASHe is a little money lender. Meant strictly for the young salaried person who sometimes needs cash before payday, the app first takes in necessary details such as your PAN number, bank details, and definitely a recent salary slip. The documents go through a quick approval process and the loan (of up to Rs 50,000) happens dependent on the risk assessment done. If the algorithm figures a user is unlikely to be able to pay, the loan is refused and can only be asked for again after a cooling off period.

A borrower can take up to 40 per cent of the take-home salary and the repayment period is of 15 days with an interest of 1.5 per cent. There's a small processing fee as well. The loan is credited within minutes.

App With A View
money view, again on Android, is a place where you can get a comprehensive view of all your personal money matters. The app seems to pick up some information from what you have on your phone, for example it knew I have two HDFC accounts and their numbers, but if your email and other data is not up to date, you'll have the joy of entering things manually.

Money View wants to be that one platform where you put in your cash in and cash out, bank balance, bills to be paid, and more. In fact, it also reminds you of payments you need to make — not that your billers don't.

You can either labour over a spreadsheet or make entries on the fly and have them with you in one dashboard all the time. And of course you can password-protect the app so that no one snoops in.

Simply Expenses
expense manager, for Android, is a lovely little app attractive in its sheer simplicity. It's got a widget which makes punching in an amount every time you spend very easy indeed. Take a moment to set up the categories of spending you typically have — travel, groceries, eating out, shopping etc — and when you enter the amount each time you spend, you just have to tick off the relevant category.

Each category is set off by a different colour of your choice, so at any time you get into the app itself to see a visual representation of the expenditure. You also get a daily reminder to log your expenses so that you don't lose track and end up having to work at it at the end of the month. Data can go into a .csv file and make a spreadsheet. You can also see some graphs etc. for your spending.