The best expense tracker app is the one you actually open. For most people in Singapore, a free app is plenty: Seedly, Planner Bee, your bank's built-in planner, or OCBC Financial OneView all pull your accounts together at no cost using SGFinDex, the government-backed data pipe that lets a single Singpass login fetch your bank balances, CPF, HDB loan, insurance and CDP holdings into one view. You only need to pay for an app like YNAB (US$109 a year) if you want a strict budgeting system and you're willing to type transactions in by hand, because YNAB and most foreign apps still can't auto-sync Singapore banks. This guide covers what each type of app does in 2026, what changed when MyMoneySense shut on 31 December 2025, and how to choose without overpaying.
Start free. There is no good reason to pay before you've stuck with tracking for a couple of months, and the local free apps cover what most people need. Pick one of these depending on what you want:
SGFinDex (the Singapore Financial Data Exchange) is the reason expense tracking in Singapore got easier than in most countries. It is digital plumbing built by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Smart Nation group that lets you retrieve your own financial data from participating institutions and government agencies, using Singpass to authorise each connection. You aren't handing your banking password to a third party; you authenticate at each institution's own portal and consent to share.
As of 2026 you can pull data from 7 banks (DBS/POSB, OCBC, UOB, Standard Chartered, Citibank, HSBC and Maybank), 7 insurers (AIA, Great Eastern, Income, HSBC Life, Manulife, Prudential and Singlife), the SGX Central Depository, and government agencies including CPF Board, HDB and IRAS. That means one login can show your current and savings accounts, fixed deposits, credit card balances, loans, unit trusts, CPF account balances, your outstanding HDB loan and monthly instalment, your latest IRAS Notice of Assessment, your CDP equities and bonds, and your active life and health insurance policies.
The limit is worth understanding: SGFinDex gives you balances and positions, not a live transaction feed. It tells you that you hold S$8,400 across two accounts and owe S$240,000 on your HDB loan; it doesn't push every kopi and Grab ride into your tracker the moment you tap. For day-to-day spending detail you still rely on your own bank app's transaction list or manual logging. Treat SGFinDex as the net-worth layer and your bank app as the spending layer.
The government's own financial planning portal, MyMoneySense, concluded its service on 31 December 2025. If you used it to view your consolidated finances, that single front door is gone, but the SGFinDex pipe behind it is alive and now wired into more apps than before.
You now access SGFinDex through participating financial planning applications and websites instead. The simplest free options are the banks' own dashboards. OCBC Financial OneView is a free financial dashboard that consolidates accounts across the participating banks, insurers, SGX CDP, CPF, HDB and IRAS in one place, and OCBC has made the data-sharing consent auto-renew yearly so you don't have to re-authorise every time it lapses. DBS NAV Planner does the same inside the DBS/POSB app. Third-party apps like Seedly and Planner Bee also connect through SGFinDex.
If you want the underlying detail or the current list of every app that connects, the official SGFinDex site and the MAS SGFinDex page are the authoritative references.
These are free and built for Singapore, which matters because foreign apps don't know what CPF is, can't read your CDP holdings, and won't recognise a PayNow transfer.
Seedly is the homegrown default. It connects via SGFinDex so your CPF, bank and investment balances flow into a net-worth view without manual entry, and it sits on top of a large personal-finance community where people compare cards, brokers and insurers. Good if you want tracking plus a place to research money decisions.
Planner Bee pulls your accounts together, tracks spending and saving, and adds insurance and investment portfolio tracking. The app itself is free; the company earns referral fees when you buy a product through them, so treat its product recommendations the way you would any advice with a commission attached.
DBS NAV Planner and OCBC Financial OneView are the bank-native options. Because they sit inside your own bank app, they see your transactions directly and can layer SGFinDex data on top for the full picture. If most of your money already moves through one of these banks, start here before downloading anything else.
If you're just starting and find finance apps dull, a manual logger built around habit can work better than a powerful one you abandon. Apps like Monny lean on a friendly interface and small challenges to make daily logging stick, which matters more in week three than any feature list. The cost is reach: these track what you type, not what your bank knows, so they suit someone learning the habit rather than someone wanting a hands-off net-worth view.
Don't dismiss the spreadsheet either. A free Google Sheets or Excel template is the most flexible and most private option going: every figure stays on your own device or drive, you can split costs however you like, and there's no company reading your transactions or nudging you toward a product. The trade-off is effort, since nothing imports itself, but for people who want full control or are wary of linking accounts, it's a legitimate answer rather than a fallback.
The trade-off with free apps is usually data: some show you where money went but give you weaker forward budgeting tools, and a few monetise through product referrals. For tracking and net worth that is fine. For a strict spending plan you may outgrow them.
YNAB (You Need A Budget) is the app people pay for, and it costs US$14.99 a month or US$109 a year, with a 34-day free trial and a free year for students who submit proof of enrolment. At mid-2026 exchange rates of roughly S$1.29 to the US dollar, the annual plan works out to about S$140, so it has to earn its place. Check the live rate before you sign up, since YNAB bills in US dollars.
What you pay for is a method, not bank connections. YNAB runs on zero-based budgeting: every dollar you have right now gets assigned a job before you spend it, so you're always budgeting money you actually hold rather than guessing against next month's income. For people who overspend and want a system that forces a decision on every dollar, it works where passive trackers don't, because a passive tracker only tells you what already happened.
The catch in Singapore is sync. YNAB's automatic bank import (Direct Import) runs through providers that cover North American and selected European banks; Singapore banks aren't supported, so you either enter transactions manually or import a file you download from your bank. Manual entry sounds like a chore, but YNAB's whole philosophy treats that friction as a feature: typing each expense makes you notice it. If you won't keep up with manual entry, you'll waste the subscription. If you will, it's the most effective budgeting tool on this list.
Before paying, run your numbers through a free budget calculator to set targets, and check whether the 50/30/20 rule or zero-based budgeting suits how your money actually moves.
Everything above assumes you're tracking your own household money. If you're self-employed, run a side hustle, or own a small company, your needs change. You're no longer just watching where cash goes; you have to separate business from personal spending, capture receipts you can claim as deductions, and produce records that hold up if IRAS asks. A personal net-worth app won't do that, so the business crowd uses a separate category of tool.
The reason this matters is the law. IRAS requires the self-employed and businesses to keep proper records and supporting documents, including receipts and invoices, for five years so income and claimed expenses can be verified. Estimates and patchy records don't count. A tool that scans a receipt the moment you pay and files it against the right expense category is doing the boring compliance work for you, which is the whole point of paying for one.
Three jobs separate a business expense tracker from a personal one: receipt scanning that pulls the amount and date off a photo, categorisation that maps spending to tax-deductible lines, and a clean export (or live link) into accounting software so your bookkeeper or your own GST return isn't a year-end scramble. GST-registered businesses care about this most, since every input-tax claim needs a tax invoice on file.
The established options, in rough order of how much accounting they bundle in: QuickBooks and Xero are full cloud accounting platforms with expense tracking, bank feeds, GST reporting and receipt capture built in, billed as monthly subscriptions. Expensify and Rydoo focus narrowly on expense and receipt management with corporate-card and reimbursement workflows, priced per active user. Aspire is a Singapore business account that bundles expense management, corporate cards and accounting integrations at no separate software fee. Pricing on all of these moves often and varies by plan tier and GST, so check each provider's own pricing page before you commit rather than trusting a figure quoted second-hand.
| Tool | Type | GST / receipt handling | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks Online | Cloud accounting + expenses | GST reporting, mobile receipt capture, bank feeds | Sole proprietors and SMEs wanting full books in one place |
| Xero | Cloud accounting + expenses | GST returns, receipt capture, bank reconciliation | Businesses working with a bookkeeper or accountant |
| Expensify | Expense and receipt management | Receipt scanning, corporate card reconciliation, reimbursements | Teams with employee claims and travel spend |
| Rydoo | Expense and receipt management | Receipt scanning, automated approval workflows | Companies needing structured approval flows |
| Aspire | Business account + expense tools | Corporate cards, expense controls, Xero/QuickBooks sync | Startups wanting account, cards and tracking together |
Joint spending breaks most personal trackers, because they're built for one person's accounts. If you and a partner split rent, groceries and utilities, or you're flatmates squaring up at month-end, you want something that records who paid for what and works out who owes whom, rather than just totalling your own card.
Two routes work. A shared-wallet app such as Spendee or Splitwise lets both people log into the same budget, tag expenses as shared or personal, and settle up with a running balance, which kills the monthly "you owe me for the aircon servicing" argument. The other route is a shared spreadsheet in Google Sheets or a free template, which costs nothing, keeps the data off any third party, and bends to whatever splitting rule you agree on. Couples merging finances often outgrow split-the-bill apps and move to a joint view in a SGFinDex app or a single shared budget instead.
Whichever you pick, agree the rules before the app: which costs are shared, how you split them (50/50, by income, or by use), and when you settle. The tool only enforces a decision you've already made. To set a fair household target first, a budget calculator gives you a number to split, and watching your joint savings rate tells you whether the arrangement is actually working.
Prices and features below are current 2026 figures; app makers change pricing and connections often, so confirm on each app's own page before you commit.
| App | Cost | Bank/CPF sync | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seedly | Free | SGFinDex (banks, CPF, CDP, insurers) | Net-worth tracking + research community |
| Planner Bee | Free (referral-funded) | SGFinDex + manual | Accounts, insurance and portfolio in one view |
| DBS NAV Planner | Free | Native DBS/POSB + SGFinDex | DBS/POSB customers |
| OCBC Financial OneView | Free | SGFinDex (auto-renew consent) | OCBC customers and consolidated dashboard |
| YNAB | US$14.99/mo or US$109/yr | No SG bank sync; manual or file import | Strict zero-based budgeting |
| Dobin | Free | Connects major banks/cards | Card spend optimisation (miles/cashback) |
| Monny / similar | Free | Manual entry only | Beginners building the logging habit |
| Spendee / Splitwise | Free (paid tiers) | Manual + shared wallets | Couples and housemates splitting costs |
| Google Sheets / Excel | Free | Manual entry; fully private | Full control and maximum privacy |
The hard part of expense tracking isn't the app, it's keeping it up for more than three weeks. Choose for stickiness, not features:
For SGFinDex connections the security model is sound: you log in with Singpass and authorise each institution at its own portal, so the app never holds your banking password, and data is shared only with your explicit consent. You can revoke a connection at any time, and consent expires unless renewed (OCBC and others now auto-renew it annually when you sync).
For apps that connect outside SGFinDex, including foreign apps that ask for read access to accounts, read what data they store and where. A budgeting app only needs to read transactions; it never needs the ability to move money. If an app asks for more access than it needs to do its job, that's a reason to look elsewhere. When in doubt, the most private option is manual entry or a simple spreadsheet, which keeps every figure on your own device.
For a full net-worth view with minimal typing, use a SGFinDex-connected app: Seedly, Planner Bee, OCBC Financial OneView, or DBS NAV Planner, all free. If you mostly bank with one of those banks, start with its built-in planner because it already sees your transactions. There is no need to pay before you've tracked consistently for a couple of months.
Only if you'll do manual entry. YNAB costs US$14.99/month or US$109/year and its automatic bank import doesn't cover Singapore banks, so you type transactions in or import a file. The payoff is its zero-based budgeting method, which forces a decision on every dollar and changes spending behaviour in a way passive trackers don't. If you won't keep up the manual logging, the subscription is wasted.
Yes, through SGFinDex. With one Singpass login, a participating app can pull your CPF account balances, your outstanding HDB loan and monthly instalment, plus bank, insurance, CDP and IRAS data. SGFinDex shows balances and positions, not a live transaction feed, so it's the net-worth layer rather than your day-to-day spending log.
MyMoneySense, the government's financial planning portal, concluded its service on 31 December 2025. The SGFinDex data exchange behind it still runs. You now view your consolidated finances through participating apps and websites instead, such as OCBC Financial OneView, DBS NAV Planner, Seedly or Planner Bee.
No. OCBC Financial OneView and DBS NAV Planner are free dashboards that consolidate accounts across the 7 participating banks, 7 insurers, SGX CDP, CPF, HDB and IRAS via SGFinDex. Seedly and Planner Bee do this for free too. Paid apps like YNAB sell a budgeting method, not the data connection.
YNAB's Direct Import runs through bank-data providers that cover North America and selected European banks; Singapore banks aren't supported. Singapore's own data-sharing route is SGFinDex, which foreign apps generally don't plug into. So with YNAB you enter transactions manually or import a downloaded file from your bank.
SGFinDex connections are safe by design: you authenticate with Singpass at each institution's own portal, the app never holds your banking password, and data flows only with your consent, which you can revoke. For apps that connect outside SGFinDex, check what they store and avoid any that ask for permission to move money rather than just read transactions.
Use a business tool, not a personal one. IRAS requires the self-employed and businesses to keep records and supporting documents for five years, so you want receipt scanning and tax-ready categorisation. QuickBooks and Xero are full cloud accounting platforms with GST reporting and receipt capture; Expensify and Rydoo focus on receipts, claims and corporate cards; Aspire bundles a business account, cards and accounting integrations. Pricing changes by plan, so check each provider's own page.
A personal tracker only sees your own accounts, so use a shared-wallet app like Spendee or Splitwise where both people log in, tag costs as shared or personal, and settle a running balance. A shared Google Sheet does the same for free and keeps the data private. Agree first which costs are shared and how you split them, since the app only enforces a rule you've already decided.
Yes, for many people. A free Google Sheets or Excel template is the most flexible and most private option: every figure stays on your own device, you split costs however you like, and no company reads your transactions or nudges you toward a product. The cost is effort, since nothing imports automatically. If you'll keep it up, a spreadsheet beats a fancy app you stop opening.
This is general financial information for Singapore, not personal financial advice. Figures change — verify current rates against the official sources above before acting. See our full disclaimer.