Let ‘Masareef’ manage your finances better

MANAGING home and personal finances is a real and legitimate concern for most people. After all, not every one of us majored in business administration or finance but all of us would like to control our spending and save more money. We want to know where does our money go every month? And subsequently, whether there’s hope for us to save any of it.

Masareef is a new Arabic app that promises to help you build your financial life, manage your money and grow your savings as well as find those financial drainers to stop immediately. Masareef surely promises a lot, but once you explore the features and options provided, you will find they are trying hard to fulfill these promises. Featured on the iTunes store; this new all-Arabic money management app is worth checking out.

When you first start, you will be encouraged to enter important financial details about you as follows:

Monthly salary, payment day, calendar (Hijri or Gregorian), daily reminder (when Masareef can remind you to add expenses) and when your day starts.

Once you set up your new account, you can simply start adding expenses by choosing the main expense category and the most suitable secondary expense category from the list provided by the app including but not limited to: Me, restaurant, home, car, travel, education, kids, etc. You can also add your own main expense cat- egory as well as new secondary categories to any existing ones. Masareef will automatically deduct expense amount from your salary and display how the new expense affects your savings.

For advanced users, and those who wish to have better control over their financial life, add any monthly commitments such as bills, allowances, salaries, loans and other common expenses that occur every month and ask to be reminded with paying that money on a certain day of the month.

Another powerful feature is the analytics feature, which you can access by clicking on the graph icon on the topright corner. At any point of time, you can now review your spending habits to know where you spend most of your money and of course make the necessary changes if possible. You can even export your analytics as PDF or Excel sheet to share with others or store online. Masareef seems to be big on security, as it gives you the chance to secure your financial details by adding a password which will prevent anyone else from accessing the app. In addition to that, you can create a backup of all your records and save it to Dropbox just in case.

The app is very useful for anyone serious about his/ her finances. I like that everything from the name to fields; messages and settings are all in Arabic.

Masareef is available for Android and iPhone smart phones. Give it a try and let us know how you find it.