Personal finance service Mint makes it easy to track your spending, manage your investments, and generally manage your money. You can link the service to your bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial institutions so that every time you spend money it shows up in Mint. But if you spend cash you might also want to enter some transaction data manually.
It’s easy to do that from the website, but Mint also offers mobile apps for iOS and Android. Up until recently there was no way to enter transactions from a phone or tablet, but last month Mint launched an updated iOS app which you could use to enter data on the go. Today the Mint Android app got the same update… and then some.
The latest version of Mint for Android allows you to add transaction data, use Google Places and GPS to find nearby merchants when you’re adding a transaction, or use Google Maps to change your location if the businesses are showing up wrong. You can also manually enter a merchant name and Mint will let you either create a new merchant or auto-complete your entry if you enter a name of a business where you’ve spent money before (and its in Mint’s system).
You can also now view transaction data by individual accounts. So you can look at your bank account, credit card account, or PayPal accounts one at a time instead of viewing all of your data at once.
One thing I noticed when taking the new app for a spin this morning is that while it’s easy to enter a merchant name, cash amount, and category for a transaction, the Mint app for Android doesn’t seem to save dates properly. I had a few transactions from earlier this week I’d been meaning to enter, so I pulled out my phone to enter them. But when I went to the Mint website, they all showed up as if the transactions had taken place today.
Still, the new Mint app pretty much eliminates the need for a separate expense tracker. I’d been using Hello Expense to keep track of cash spending while on the go, and then manually entering data into the Mint website when I return home. Now I can cut Hello Expense out of my workflow — although I might keep it around in case I need to track expenses made in places where I don’t have an internet connection. Mint won’t work unless you’re online.
