App to track travel expenses?

I've been using MoneyWiz to track all of my expenses for the past few months, and I'm very happy with it. I mention it because it is a general money manager, and handles different currencies very well. For my upcoming trip to Germany, I set up a euros-based account in it to track the cash I carry. I also like the fact that it runs on both my iPhone and my Android phone, and syncs between them.

It does offer "envelope budgeting", but I haven't used this feature yet. I'd imagine you could enter all your expenses under the same category, (such as 'travel') and track expenses that way.

I have an app on my iPad that is actually just called 'Spending' - the icon is a wallet. It was a free one, so ads pop up after doing 5 or so entries. It's fairly simple and straightforward - I just have income (which would be my trip budget) then categories for spending like food, accoms, public transport, attractions, shopping...I never break it down into daily spending (eg - my budget would be $4000 for the trip) but you could set up a daily budget and enter your daily expenses.

I also downloaded one that was free one day but is generally paid. It's called Wealthy. But...I haven't had a trip since I downloaded it so I haven't used it in 'real' time. What I like about it - you can take a photo in the app - so if you want to enter, say - your breakfast expense and want to take a photo of the meal you can do that. I thought it would be helpful for when we eat somewhere - that I would take a photo of the meal or menu so later on when I am doing my personal trip blog, I can recall where/what we ate (if it was good enough to want to remember). I'm not sure I would use it for every expense, but more for things like food where I may want to recall where and what we ate, then transfer over to the spending app.

Hi Terri, it sounds like you're wanting to track daily expenses to ensure you're not over-spending on your trip, not just for keeping track of how much you spent on this trip overall. If that's the case, just make sure you are planning how much you're expecting to spend specifically for each day/location - not just taking the total and dividing by the quantity of days of vacation.

Here's an example of a 6 day trip:
Daily allowance for the trip could be the total divided by 6.
OR
1) Paris for 3 days - plan to spend X on food, Y on the 3-Day Museum Pass, Z on hotel. (Divide by 3)
2) Siena for 3 days - plan to spend A on food, B on Cathedral ticket, C on hotel. (Divide by 3)

The amount you will spend in Paris will be more per day, so you would not want to just divide your total days by 6; otherwise, you will over-spend (& not be happy) in Paris. And the 1st day will be even worse because that's the day you bought the 3-Day Museum Pass.

I recommend looking at each day & setting a "Planned" amount for that day (knowing ahead prices of museum passes, events, etc.) Then, you can check if your "Actual" per day is matching your "Planned" to keep on track.

The "app" I use to track daily expenses is a spiral-bound memo book, a pen and a pocket calculator. I write down every expenditure (cash or credit card) and balance my calculated cash to actual cash every day or so to ensure that I have recorded every expense and ATM withdrawal.

I don't have a "daily budget" number per se -- I do a spreadsheet of anticipated costs for the entire trip based on pre-booked accommodations, pre-purchased train and plane fares, planned purchases of museum and transportation passes, any other known specific expenses like auto rental, and a generalised $100 per day for "food and stuff". Then I move money into the checking account that the ATM withdrawals will access.

Why look for a 2nd party app. I created my own travel expense spreadsheet based on the expense report sheets I used while traveling for business. If you have a spreadsheet program (Excel, etc) it's not difficult to do, and you can customize it to suit you own requirements.

@Lee, how do you use the spreadsheet on-the-go? Do you carry your laptop on the trip, or use a printout?

I also customized my own spreadsheet to make a budget and to track actual expenses.

On my mobile devices (phone or tablet), I use a highly rated free app called WPS which is available in both iOS or Android. It is fully Microsoft compatible.

I sync and save any spreadsheets or Word documents in Dropbox, which means the file is on my device and also saved in a cloud server. If i lose my device, i can still access my document if i can find another device or computer with internet access.

For the last several trips I've used an Acer Aspire One netbook. It only weighs a little over 2#. I like the real keyboard since I do so much typing. I have another workbook with my itinerary, sheets for information on each town where I stay, and rail schedules for each travel day. With Internet access I can send and receive email and post to my website. I also keep a journal on it and use it to hold and organize my photos.

I actually keep two expense workbooks, one to fill in with expenses as I pay them and another filled in before I go with expenses I know in advance (pre-booked accommodations, expenses for known travel and admissions, and estimates from experience for meals and misc. So before I go I know pretty close what the trip will cost me, and as I pay, I delete the expense, so at any time I know how much cash I will need to finish my trip (helpful the last time I visit the ATM).

I recently acquired an ASUS transformer (pad with removable keyboard). I plan on using it mostly like my netbook, but I can leave the keyboard at the hotel and take it with my during the day as a lighter-weight pad. Plus it has around 11 hours of battery life which will be nice for the trip over.

Actually I am more basic that any of you. I simple use half size envelopes - take a half dozen or so. When I buy anything, cash or credit, in Europe you get a receipt. The receipt hits a pocket on the day bag. Sometime that day when having gelato or coffee, I pull out the envelope and the receipts. Record the expenditures on the envelope and place the receipts inside. Sometime later in the week when I might have a down time in the hotel room, will pull out the envelope, toss the cash receipts, save credit card, and sum the daily expenses and transfer the daily totals to the ipad. Simple and easy.

Frank,

That's a wonderfully simple solution. What type of app are you using in the iPad to record the expenses?