6 Financial Apps to Automate Bookkeeping, Tax Deductions, Savings & More

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With all the new apps and software out there, keeping track of your expenses, paying your employees, and even saving up money for investments (or otherwise) has become easier than ever. Still, some tech tools are better than others.

Don’t take it from me; here are six apps endorsed by those who have used them and experienced their time and effort-saving abilities firsthand.

Be sure to let us know what financial apps are making life a little bit simpler for you by leaving a comment below!

1. Receipt Bank

Ian Naylor, Founder & CEO of AppInstitute:

“I love Receipt Bank because it makes a tedious job really simple and quick. As a busy exec, I’m often out traveling and entertaining partners and clients. This racks up a fair amount of expenses, which tend to either get lost in pockets or put in my wallet to the point of it bursting. Then comes the laborious task of translating that into a expense claim form. This is then compounded as some poor fellow in the accounts team has to take the expense claim and retype that into our accounts package and file the receipts. Overall, this is a productivity killer and open to error of bits of paper being lost or misplaced.

Receipt Bank totally changes all of this; at the point I get the receipt, I take a quick pic via the app. This then uses OCR (optical character recognition) to pull all the information, including supplier, cost, date, and description. It then integrates with our accounting platform and posts the data, including attaching a digital copy of the receipt. The additional bonus to all this is if I’ve used the supplier before, it even knows which ledge in the P&L to post to, meaning zero effort for the accounts team.”

2. Remitly

Alex Reichmann, CEO of iTestCash:

“As an online business owner, I find the Remitly app to be very useful. I work with a lot of freelancers, which sometimes means working with people overseas for work on my website. I find Remitly to be be one of the easiest ways to pay workers that don’t use PayPal. It also happens to have a little bit less fees than PayPal and the money gets transferred in minutes, while a bank could take days to wire transfer money overseas.”

3. QuickBooks Self-Employed

Michael Cirillo, Founder and CEO of FlexDealer, an inbound marketing agency for automotive dealers with clients in 5 countries:

“I just started using the new QuickBooks Self-Employed app about a month ago and am really enjoying it, particularly the auto-tracking feature for mileage. It tracks when you start and stop moving in a vehicle and logs the miles. All you have to do is swipe right if it’s for business, left if it’s personal.

As many entrepreneurs know, tracking mileage the traditional way with a log-book is not only cumbersome, but it’s easy to forget to do. It’s frightening to think about how much money I’ve left on the table by not remembering to track my mileage in the past. This app helps with that.

As expected, Quickbooks also lets you connect to your bank accounts and properly categorize your expenses and even create rules for categorization based on transaction type. Inside of each transaction, you have the ability to take a photo of a receipt or invoice and then export all of the data so that it’s easy to send to your accountant or bookkeeper.”

4. Qapital

Shawn Parrotte, Marketing Manager at Designli.co:

“Qapital is a clever app for those folks that have a hard time saving money. Utilizing an IFTTT (If this, then that) philosophy plus some gamification, the app lets you deposit money a little a time and have fun doing it. For example, you can round up your average daily purchases to the next dollar, and that money will find its way into your Qapital savings account. Or you can even set yourself a goal and a set of rules to start saving. Want to get to Portugal next year? Set an amount and the conditions, e.g. ‘went to the gym,’ or link it to the weather forecast, which triggers automatic savings when it snows. There are thousands of ‘rules’ available, and you can even create your own to make saving easy and fun.”

5. Acorns

Tyler Riddell, Director of Marketing at eSUB Construction Software, a Microsoft partner and thought leader published in IECI, Startups-List, ConstructionExec, the INTEX
Commercial Construction Expo, and more:

“I’ve been absolutely loving Acorns because it helps me save and invest my money without me knowing it! Pretty much every time I make a purchase, the extra change leftover will be automatically inputted into my savings account. So over time, my account has really grown because of the app with zero effort from me!”

6. Moneybox

Seb Dean, The Imaginaire Web Design:

“I’m an entrepreneur in the UK and my favourite personal finance app at the minute has to be Moneybox. It allows me to save a weekly amount, then choose a risk profile for my investments and then does all of the hard work for me! I can see which funds I’m invested in and the performance in real time, which is great.

I run a busy digital agency called Imaginaire Digital and so anything that uses technology to make my life easier is welcomed!”

What financial apps are you loving?

Tell us what you use and why below!

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.