Spend Stack
Keep track of your weekly grocery spend
$4.99 From Dreaming In Binary, spendstack.com made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch needs iOS 11 or later
When it comes to making lists for trips to the grocery store, there’s no shortage of apps offering to help compile lists and check things off as you go. However, Spend Stack is different. It’s not designed to help you remember what to buy, but to help you keep track of how much you’re spending.
Part list maker, part calculation tool, Spend Stack can add sales tax automatically — useful in the US, or anywhere else where sales tax is added at the till — or not, depending on how you configure it. But it doesn’t stop there. It can apply discounts, and display the cost per unit of items like pre–packaged food or veg, or the other way round — working out the total cost when you tap in the cost per unit and quantity.
Apply tags to items and Spend Stack tracks how much you spend on each tag, and can display it in a graph. You can have multiple lists, sync them with other devices, share them with friends and family, or export them.
Spend Stack is both easy and fun to use. As with any other list app, getting the most out of it requires you to use it regularly. If you’re serious about tracking spending, you’ll need to log everything you buy. Do that, use tags, and the reward is a detailed breakdown of all your spending.
Items in lists are displayed intelligently, with the amount you’ve spent in large bold text, and weight and discount applied (if you’ve supplied the data) next to the item name in smaller, lighter text. Applicable sales tax is shown underneath the final price.
Lists can be sorted alphabetically, or according to when they were created. And you can search for items within lists from the main screen. You can also attach images to list items.
The one minor issue we had was in adding items to the list. Tap the “+” at the bottom of the screen and you can type in the item name, price, and a tag. But to add more details, you have to press Done, then tap the item again. Also, when you edit details of an item, you have to dismiss the keyboard to get to the Done button. But these are very minor issues that make Spend Stack only slightly less easy to use.
THE BOTTOM LINE. If you need a list app that tracks your spend as well as tells you what you need to buy, Spend Stack is excellent.