PocketSmith

PocketSmith is a comprehensive budgeting and personal finance app designed to help consumers take control of their money. It was first launched in New Zealand in 2008, it offers a range of features to make managing your finances easier. You can connect to over 12,000 financial institutions worldwide, automatically import and categorise your transactions, and create customised budgets.

One of its standout features is the ability to forecast your financial future, allowing you to see your projected daily bank balances up to 30 years ahead. The app also includes a unique calendar view that helps you visualise your upcoming bills and expenses, making it easier to plan and avoid cashflow problems. Additionally, PocketSmith supports multiple currencies, tracks your net worth, and offers ‘what-if’ scenarios to test financial decisions. Although its free version is very usable, advanced features such as automatic bank feeds and longer-term forecasts require paid versions of the app.

For this review, we’ll stick with the free version as we have done for all the other options.

Importing transactions is fairly straightforward on the free version. You just need to download a CSV file from your bank and upload this to PocketSmith. You then tell PocketSmith which columns relate to which fields and let PocketSmith do the rest. Unlike other apps, this app won’t try to guess what transactions are for you. Instead, you have to tell it. However, they do have rules you can apply, to automatically categorise transactions. For example, you can tell PocketSmith that any transactions containing the phrase “New World” should be put to groceries.

The dashboard provides a detailed overview of your budget and spending. There are also a number of reports you can run in PocketSmith, including useful ones such as net worth and cash flow. Net worth allows you to add other bank accounts, assets (such as investment or property) and loans. You can even link loans to assets and tell PocketSmith what your interest rate is. This is great for those looking to pay off debt! A cash flow report gives an overview of money in vs money out and provides some handy projections (the free version will let you look forward 6 months). PocketSmith also offers a mobile companion app which offers access to more basic features on the go.

We’d recommend PocketSmith to young individuals, couples/families (whether homeowners or not) and anyone looking to pay off debt and start building up your finances.

MyBudgetPal

MyBudgetPal is a free budgeting tool created by Booster, a New Zealand KiwiSaver provider, designed for Kiwis to help them manage their finances more effectively. This user-friendly app connects directly to your bank accounts and automatically categorises your expenses, simplifying the budgeting process.

With MyBudgetPal, you can compare your spending across different time periods, allowing you to identify and address any problematic spending habits. The app also enables you to set spending limits for various expense categories, helping you stay on track with your financial goals.

Linking your New Zealand bank account is simple. Although MyBudgetPal warns customers that they may encounter issues with banks linking their accounts, we found that the process of linking an ASB account went smoothly with no hiccups. Once imported, MyBudgetPal will attempt to categorise transactions automatically. For the most part, MyBudgetPal does a decent job but you may need to give it a hand. Through the Booster app you can access your budget. We’d call the mobile experience good enough, just not as good as some of the others we looked at.

Booster also allows you to track your investments and debt. This is manual but you can enter shareholdings into MyBudgetPal and see the value of your investments in one place. This makes MyBudgetPal good for those who want to see an overview of their position at a glance.

Who is MyBudgetPal best for? Anyone whose financial goals involve tracking assets and debt would greatly benefit from MyBudgetPal. First home buyers and those looking to prepare for retirement should check MyBudgetPal out.

Money Lover

MoneyLover probably has the most visually appealing UI of all the apps we looked at. It’s good for people new to budgeting and for expense tracking, but unfortunately it doesn’t allow access to bank feeds from any NZ banks (it does support Australian banks, however, so this could be on the horizon). Despite this, adding transactions is extremely simple but does have to be done one by one.

Once you have your transactions in, using the app is a pleasant and straightforward experience. Creating budgets is intuitive, and, compared to PocketSmith, their dashboard is simplistic but tells you what most users care about, or how close to budget you are. Although you can add investments and debt, these features are not as fully-fledged as some might like.

We’d recommend MoneyLover for anyone new to budgeting with a relatively low volume of simple transactions and not looking for automated connectivity with their bank. This makes MoneyLover awesome for students or anyone starting that first job looking to make their money go further.

Sorted

Okay, this one is a tool to help you build a Budget Planner rather than a fully-fledged budgeting and tracking app. But before you skip past, hear us out. Some people might prefer the simplicity that this tool can offer.

Sorted’s tool will ask you some questions to get started, such as what your spending looks like and what assets you have, your life stage and what your goals are. Then it gives you a template for a budget.

The design of the Budget Planner makes it easy to enter your budgeted amounts on an annual, monthly, fortnightly or weekly basis, and add in saving and investing goals. Sorted will then generate an annual budget for you and compare this to your income! There’s no fancy expenditure tracking or coding going on here, it’s a simple tool to help you build a simple budget.

We think this one is great for first-time flatters or anyone looking for a simple tool to help them come up with a budget and nothing more. It could also be great for scenario planning, say you want to see how that new promotion or lifestyle change will impact your finances.

Sometimes less is more and if that appeals to you, then definitely check Sorted’s Budget Planner. But if you’re after more advanced features or want to track spending, you’re best looking elsewhere.

BudgetBuddie

The newcomer in this category. BudgetBuddie is a comprehensive personal finance app designed specifically for New Zealanders that brings all your financial accounts into one easy-to-use platform.

The app’s core strength lies in its ability to connect with more than 25 New Zealand banks, KiwiSaver providers, and investment platforms (including ASB, BNZ, Westpac, Sharesies, and various KiwiSaver schemes), allowing you to see your complete financial picture without switching between multiple apps.

BudgetBuddie provides real-time insights into your spending habits through automated transaction categorization, customizable budgeting tools, and detailed spending analysis across different time periods.

Beyond basic money management, BudgetBuddie offers goal-setting functionality with automatic progress tracking, allowing you to visualize your progress toward financial targets like holidays or home deposits. The app also calculates your net worth by tracking both assets and liabilities in real-time, giving you a clear understanding of your overall financial position.

Available on mobile and web platforms with various subscription tiers (including a free option), BudgetBuddie provides Kiwis with a locally-developed solution that simplifies personal finance management across the entire New Zealand financial ecosystem.

Splitwise - For splitting expenses

If you live with flatmates, family, or are traveling with friends, Splitwise would be a great option for helping to keep track of your shared expenses.

When there’s no solid way of tracking your shared expenses, it’s easy to get lost with how much you are spending and saving. Splitwise enables you to track every aspect that comes with sharing expenses, such as total bill payments, what each person owes and who they owe to, as well as any outstanding balances.

Splitwise is great due to the versatility of being able to use it for many different purposes. For example, road trips can be nightmarish when going in a large group, trying to keep track of gas money, food and places you may be staying. Maybe your date nights have shared costs. Maybe you live with friends or family where bills are split. Regardless of your situation, Splitwise easily allows you to quickly add, settle, and track all your shared expenses.

Features to consider when choosing a budgeting app

Even though our list only details a handful of great budgeting apps, there are still countless ones out there for you to choose from. Here are some common features you might want to keep an eye out for when selecting an app to help manage your finances. The table below details how the apps we’ve talked about weigh up with these features in mind.

Rating on the app store

Making sure an app has good testimonials is always a good place to start. The star rating on an app store will let you know how much other people are enjoying the app too. It's important to take this one step further and have a look at the review section as well, just in case anyone has had any alarming experiences with the app too.

Ranking on app store for the Finance category

Most budgeting apps will fall under the finance category unless otherwise specified. Seeing how an app ranks against other budgeting apps is important as it only earns a spot on the list based on how many good reviews it has. The better the reviews, the higher the star rating will be, and therefore the higher the spot on the designated category list it will be.

Free version vs premium version/features

Most budgeting apps are free, however, some will offer a premium plan or features which allow you to be more specific with your budgeting, give the ability to sync bank accounts so you don’t have to manually input your transactions and so on. Some offer these features for free as well. Prices for premium versions range from $2.00-$40.00 and typically charge by month or on a yearly basis.

Shared budget function

There are so many instances in which expenses are shared these days, whether that be household expenses with flat mates, splitting bills or groceries with your family and friends, going away on trips in groups, date nights, splitting gas money and so on. Being able to share budgets is a great feature to look out for if you do have shared expenses so you never have to worry about who owes what to whom, or when things have been settled.

Syncing to your bank account

This feature is sought after as it saves time and is easy to keep up with as the app will automatically pick up on transactions going in and out of your account. Without it being synced, you will have to manually enter in all your transactions, which can lead to difficulties staying consistent in the long run.

Data sourced on 17 Mar 2025

And last but not least… Quashed.co.nz

While not purely a budgeting app, Quashed helps you to track your insurance policies all in one place. It tells you your total insurance spend at a glance. For consumers, insurance takes up a big chunk of our budget - the average New Zealand household will spend more than $100,000+ on insurance over our lifetime.

Being able to save 20-30% on insurance costs will mean between $20,000 to $30,000 back in our pockets. However, most of us, do not know what we current spend and how much we can save. That's where Quashed comes in!

In comes Market Scan - the most popular feature within Quashed. It helps to compare prices and benefits of policies in a matter of a couple of minutes. Car, House, Contents, Motorcycle and Life insurance are some of the types of covers you can compare and shop via the platform.

Quashed is free to use - save your insurance today!