Getting started with Simply Finance.

You need almost nothing: a phone and the balances of the accounts you want to track. Because Simply Finance never connects to your bank, you will not be asked for a bank username, password, or any third-party login. You will type your starting balances in once, and from then on you keep them current by logging spending as it happens.

Download Simply Finance free from the App Store or Google Play. It opens straight to a short onboarding screen — no email, no verification code, no account creation. The app is free to use; a single optional $4.99 unlock later adds sync across your devices and detailed reports, but nothing about setup requires it.

Add the accounts you want to keep an eye on: checking, savings, credit cards, and cash all live on one screen. For each, enter its current balance — whatever your bank app shows right now. That single number is your starting point; you do not need to import any history to begin.

Do not worry about being exhaustive. Two or three accounts that cover most of your spending are plenty to start. You can add more at any time.

Pick three or four categories you actually care about — groceries, eating out, transport, whatever tends to get away from you — and give each a monthly budget. Simply Finance uses plain per-category monthly budgets, so each one simply shows what you have spent, what is left, and whether you have gone over. There is no envelope method and no rules to assign.

Resist the urge to budget every category on day one. Start narrow, see what the numbers tell you after a week, and add categories as they earn their place.

This is the habit the whole app is built around, so make it once now: tap to add a transaction, type the amount, pick a category, and save. It takes about three seconds. Because nothing is imported from a bank feed, there is nothing to reconcile later and no miscategorized imports to clean up — what you enter is exactly what you meant.

Add the things that repeat — rent, subscriptions, utilities, memberships. Simply Finance keeps them on a list and reminds you before each one is due, so you can confirm it with a tap when it lands or skip it if it did not. This is also the fastest way to spot a subscription you meant to cancel months ago.

Recurring bills feed into your forward-looking numbers, which is why they are worth adding early — they are most of what makes your runway accurate.

Now the payoff. The home screen opens straight to the answers most apps bury: your Financial Runway — how many months your money would last at your current pace — and Future Sight, which projects your balance forward from your real income and spending. These are the numbers that actually lower money anxiety, and a bank-synced dashboard rarely shows them.

If you want the same data on more than one device — say your iPhone and an Android tablet — the optional $4.99 unlock adds end-to-end encrypted sync. Your data is encrypted on your device before it ever leaves, so the sync relay only ever holds scrambled ciphertext: no readable balances, merchants, or amounts. If you use a single device, you can skip this entirely; everything works fully offline.