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January 30, 2013
30 Jan 2013

Happy New Year from Spense!


We hope that you and your loved ones had a safe and festive holiday season.

The holidays are a time when we all spend more money than we planned.  Often we don’t even know how much we spent or where the money went.

Start the New Year off right by making a resolution to track your expenses.  It’s easy using Spense.  Just by tracking what you spend each day, you can make smarter spending decisions and save money for the New Year.

Spense succeeds where other financial management tools fail. By entering your expenses as you make them, you are always aware of where your money is going.  You can make smarter decisions immediately without having to wait to check your bank account or enter receipts into a spreadsheet.  With other tools, you may go days or weeks without checking your balance.

Take control of your daily spending by tracking your expenses.  With just a few taps, you instantly see the balance in your spending target.  You can decide on the spot whether you have enough money left for that great pair of shoes!

We are also proud to introduce Spense Plus.  Spense Plus instantly syncs transactions using our secure cloud sync technology, gives you the ability to access your spending journal with multiple devices, share a spending journal with family members or friends, and receive an email at the end of each cycle with all of your transaction history.

We invite you to start the New Year off right by tracking your expenses with Spense.  You’ll be glad you did!

 

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December 29, 2012
29 Dec 2012

The Budget Tracker

After Craig and I had been using the “budget tracker” for a couple of years, we had a crazy thought.  If we were able to use it and save money, would others be able to as well?  In January 2012, we started thinking about turning the program that was just for us into an iPhone app that we could put on the App Store.  We bought a Mac, Craig got his developer’s license and we got started.

Little did we know that it would be 9 long months before Spense would become a reality.  Hours of brainstorming, design sessions, late nights of programming, questions and more questions taught us that developing an app in our basement was not an easy task.

Many of those hours were spent trying to come up with a name for our app.  So many finance apps out there already had “expense” or “budget” in their names.  We knew we couldn’t use “budget tracker.”  We wanted to stand out.  We finally came up with Spense, a combination of “spending” and “expense”.

I spent many frustrating days with photo manipulation and graphic design software only to realize that creating a logo and icon were beyond my capabilities.  We decided to hire a graphic designer, because we knew that the icon would be the first thing that draws people to our app on the App Store.  Amy Ottalagano of Amy Lee Graphic Designs worked tirelessly with us for months on developing something simple but eye catching.  We couldn’t be happier with the result!

Craig and I spent many weekends playing around with the design and layout of the app.  We wanted it to be simple, straight forward, and user friendly.  The easier it is to use, the more likely people will be to use it.

We submitted Spense to the App Store for approval on August 27, 2012 and waited on pins and needles to see if it was approved.  Finally, on September 4th, we got the email that said Spense was ready for sale in the App Store.  It was an unbelievable feeling!

I did loads of marketing the day that Spense was approved.  Within 48 hours we had been featured on 3 local TV news programs and within 2 weeks, Spense had been in 37 newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations around the country.  Our hard work had paid off!

Now that Spense is available on the App Store, that doesn’t mean our work is done.  I spend hours every day with social media, marketing, maintaining the website, and answering questions about Spense.  Craig works nights and weekends on updates to Spense, and we are planning to start work on an Android version within the next few months.

We have been incredibly blessed to have loyal support from our friends and families.  We couldn’t have been such a success without them!Our whole family is involved with the development of Spense!

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November 15, 2012
15 Nov 2012

Welcome to the Spense Blog!

Welcome to our Blog!

First, a little history…Craig and I have been together since we were 17.  We were college students together, young married people together, and then a family together.  Even with both of us working, we still seemed to be always living paycheck to paycheck.

My senior prom--April 1987

After our boys were born, we decided to get serious about staying on a budget.  We planned out each category and an amount for each.  We were diligent about staying within our budget for a few months and then we would get tired of bringing home receipts and entering them in on the computer.  Slowly, we would get back to our old ways of just spending and hoping there was enough money in the bank to cover it.  Over and over, we repeated this cycle.  Staying on a budget is hard!  We just couldn’t seem to make it work for us.

About 2 years ago, we both got iPhones.  Craig decided to write a little web program that the two of us could use to track our daily spending on our phones.  We called it the Budget Tracker.   We sat down and figured out how much we had to spend outside of our bills.  This became our balance for the Budget Tracker.

The idea was to enter in anything that we spent that wasn’t a set charge.  We didn’t enter the cable bill, or the car payment, just things we spent daily.  I started entering the amounts as I shopped for groceries, bought the boys new shoes, got gas, and went out to lunch. The balance came down as I entered in the expenses.  It was amazing to us to see how those little things added up!

After a while, it became a habit to automatically take out my iPhone and enter in my purchase.  Usually I would enter it as soon as I left the store or when I got in my car.  This way I didn’t have to worry about bringing the receipt home to enter in the computer.

After using the “Budget Tracker” for a few months, we were amazed at how much easier it was to get from paycheck to paycheck.  Being able to see how much money we had left in our balance was a very good incentive not to overspend.  If I knew we only had $140.00 left in our Budget Tracker balance and the boys needed basketball shoes and we needed groceries, I would probably wait until the next Budget Tracker cycle to get the new shoes.

We were really stopping to think about what we were spending.

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August 9, 2012
09 Aug 2012

Tracking Your Expenses Works!

This iPhone app is simple, with no bank account information, no receipts, and no complications. That is why it works!  Most expense tracking apps are so complicated that people give up using them within a few weeks.  Spense is built to be easy to use while you are out running errands, buying groceries, getting gas, and more.

It is a simple, easy way to track your daily spending without having to carry around loads of receipts.  It’s not linked to your bank accounts, and it’s not about paying your bills.  It’s all about tracking your daily expenses.  By keeping track of your daily expenses, you can see where you are spending your money each month. Spense is built to be a budget tracker you find easy to use!

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August 9, 2012
09 Aug 2012

Track Your Spending and Save Money


Spense is an easy, on the go way to track your daily expenses, straight from your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad:

  • When you spend money, enter the amount and category
  • Money spent is automatically deducted from your set spending target
  • Instantly see your current balance
  • Easy to read transaction history of your expenses and charts of your spending

Spense is built to be used while you are out running errands:

  • Fast entry so you can enter purchases as you make them
  • Make better spending decisions by always knowing your balance
  • No need to carry around receipts or remember to input transactions at a later time
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