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Spend Stack is My Favorite Cash Tracking App That Embraces iOS
Spend Stack is both similar and dissimilar to other finance tracking apps. Rather than just a budgeting system for your credit cards, Spend Stack allows…
Spend Stack is both similar and dissimilar to other finance tracking apps. Rather than just a budgeting system for your credit cards, Spend Stack allows you to create various lists for almost anything. And I mean anything.
Think of creating lists for anything you need to track. Maybe it is the holidays (wink wink) and you want to see how much you’re spending on each person on your list. You can have a“Santa List” with each of your kids or relatives grouped separately within. Maybe you have a trip to the Grand Canyon and want to know how much you spend on the trip between travel, food, and collectible snow globes. My favorite, and most relatable, is tracking my growing list of monthly subscriptions.
I created a list for subscriptions and then broke it down between my apps, streaming services, gaming subscriptions, and others. As prices increase and we wind up subbing to more and more services, this is a great way to bring some transparency to an otherwise expensive cash suck. It seems like more and more purchases are switching to monthly subscriptions that come off as inconsequential but add up fast when you compile them together.
Adding items to lists is easy to do and the app looks glorious doing it. It’s clean and minimalist, just as I like it. You can tag items, use a different currency, and move between devices. A cool use is getting a running total of what something may cost. Take the full price, calculate a 17% discount, add tax, and compute multiple quantities. Even if something is priced by weight.
What I love so much about Spend Stack is that with iOS 14, it is a first class citizen. It takes advantage of so many features that I didn’t know were available to developers. The app was designed using Apple’s responsive layouts so that it adjusts to any size screen, including running it on your Mac. It supports Low Power mode and disables animations and blurring in the app when Low Power mode is on. On iPad, it supports multiple windows as well as a mouse cursor. Their are rich links throughout the app, contextual menus with Haptic Touch, drag and drop, Dynamic Type (so the type size adjusts with the system), accessibility, and dark mode. Not to mention widgets...
Widgets deserve some attention on their own, because this app is perfectly matched with Apple’s widgets of iOS 14. You can create several different widgets for your Home Screen for all your different lists. Each of those widgets, which come in multiple sizes, can have a corresponding icon with them as well as a a colorful graph for you to visually track.
Other amazing features include one-tap support to import your Apple Card statements and support for iCloud. With iCloud, you can backup all your data as well as share lists with others. It is also thanks to iCloud that you can jump between your iPhone and iPad and not lose track of any purchases.
Spend Stack is a well-designed app that approaches cash tracking differently. I was never able to follow a full budgeting app like YNAB or Pennies, but being able to put things into smaller individual lists is much more feasible and something I’ve been able to keep up with regularly. The way Spend Stack is able to tightly integrate with iOS makes it even more of a compelling purchase.
But enough about other people's apps.
