Whether you’re traveling alone or with a group, tracking your spending with a travel budget app can help you avoid overspending and even split expenses equally between your travel partners. Here are the best options.
WORK Travel apps
Expensify: Managing your expenses when traveling for work can be challenging. Expensify lets you track expenses easily. Instead of ransacking your luggage for that missing dinner receipt, just snap a picture of the receipt with the Smart Scan feature, and share it with your accounting team for reimbursement.
If you’re merely tracking expenses for tax purposes, Expensify offers several tools. The GPS calculator automatically tracks your eligible mileage for you so you don’t have to enter it manually. This app also lets you create expense reports by scanning receipts or entering time worked, for billing purposes.
The app is free for most users. A “Collect” account, which includes accounting and payroll tools, costs $5 per month. Meanwhile, a “Control” account costs $9 per month and allows for multiple approvers, setting expense policies and custom reporting tools.
When you sign up, you can get a seven-day free trial of the Collect and Control memberships.
SAP Concur: If you’re a seasoned business traveler, you may already be familiar with the Concur suite. If you aren’t, get ready to meet one of the most robust, full-featured business travel solutions available today.
Within the SAP Concur suite, you’ll find separate modules for managing travel plans and submitting reimbursement requests for travel expenses. Concur Expense’s ExpenseIt app for travel expenses makes it easy to take pictures of your receipts and automatically categorize them to submit as expense reports. Concur Travel lets you book your own work travel or make arrangements with your company’s preselected airline carriers and hotels.
Business owners and managers can try Concur Expense and Concur Travel for free; individual users who have access to these tools through their employer can download the app on iOS or Google Play.
Solo travel apps
PocketGuard: PocketGuard markets itself as the “No. 1 budgeting app for college students and overspenders,” but it’s a great vacation budget planner as well. That’s because the app calculates how much disposable income you have available. You can then allocate this toward your travel budget.
If you’re willing to go into debt to travel, PocketGuard might be able to help with that, too. This impromptu travel app will recommend a strategy for paying off debt in the most efficient way.
Trabee Pocket: The Trabee Pocket app provides both budgeting and expense tracking. Trabee lets you set a vacation budget and then enter your expenses to track how much you’re spending in different categories. The app provides currency conversion, too.
At the end of your trip, you can export your expense data to a PDF or CSV file for future budgeting and tax purposes. Trabee is available on iOS and the Google Play store.
Tripcoin: You can use Tripcoin without an internet connection, which is important if you’re traveling through remote areas. The app’s Dropbox integration also makes it possible to back up your data in case you lose your phone.
Tripcoin makes it easy to set up a trip and break down your spending each day by category. You can find out how much you’re spending on transportation, meals, activities and other expenses.
Tripcoin supports over 150 currencies, converging your spending automatically based on current exchange rates. This ensures accuracy, and frees you from performing this tedious task yourself.
apps for groups
Splitwise: If you’re traveling with a group, it’s not always practical for each person to pay for their own expenses. Pulling out multiple credit cards to cover the group dinner bill is possible, but booking group tours and even airfare can be a hassle when done individually.
Splitwise lets users track shared expenses and the balance owed by each person. This transparency can make it easier to determine who owes what at the end of a trip. Splitwise can also load expenses as you go and scan receipts with the paid pro version of the app. One of its biggest advantages is having everything on one platform.
Even without spending $4.99 per month on the pro version, this budget app is still quite useful. If you’re planning a group trip and need a way to split expenses, download the free app and add group members.
Batch App: This one is for the planners. Planning bachelor or bachelorette parties are notoriously challenging on both budget and group logistics. But the Batch app simplifies things with budgeting and planning tools designed to make parties and vacations less stressful. Users can budget, plan and book activities for a dinner party, group trip, birthday or bachelorette party. You can add friends to the app to communicate more easily, as well as divide expenses in the app.
While Batch is primarily marketed around bachelorette parties, you can use it to book any type of group activity in participating cities. One downside is that the free app doesn’t handle payments. It only helps track group expenses through its Ledger feature, so you can see who owes what.
TravelSpend: In my experience, one of the best travel budget apps is TravelSpend. It’s simple to use, automatically converts spending to your home currency and lets you add friends so you can track expenses together.
It took no time at all to enter my spending as it occurred and it was immediately deducted from my set budget for the trip so I could see how much was left to spend at a glance. It was also nice to see what categories I did most of my spending in. which would come in handy for those using a rotating category credit card.
With the premium version ($4.99 per month), you get added functionality such as:
Creating custom categories
Attaching GPS locations to your costs
Adding income
Creating your own exchange rate
Seeing and settling debts
Even without the added features of the premium version, using TravelSpend for free is powerful on its own.