Clarity Money - Budget Manager Reviews

by Hide&seek Champion

I loved ClarityMoney as a college student out of state. It helped me balance two bank accounts and see all my transactions. The trouble started when I opened a “clarity money savings account”. Due to graduating and moving back home, I had to close the bank account that I used in the state where I lived for college. Unfortunately that was the account that “clarity money savings” was drawing from. And now that the account is closed I’ve no way to withdraw my money from the savings account! There is also no help from the “support” team at clarity money, I’ve tried their live chat thing & emailing! The live chat robots are no help and say the same thing over and over and emailing does absolutely nothing, haven’t gotten a response at all! ClarityMoney is too faulty in my opinion. I strongly suggest that if you use ClarityMoney and especially the savings feature, withdraw your money now! Or make sure you withdraw your money from clarity savings before you close your account because you’ll get zero help from the “support” team (that probably doesn’t even exist) and you won’t get your money. A few suggestions for the developer: #1 make it easier to transfer money in the savings account to a different account that is linked on ClarityMoney , especially after the one that the savings account is drawing from has been closed. #2 have a phone number for support and trouble shooting. It sure would be nice to talk to a real person to find out how to get my money back!!!!

by Great God Of Fire

I was super excited about ClarityMoney, but now with actual use, I’ll probably end up deleting it. I’m in search of a good spending tracker, but that means I MUST be able to customize a few categories based on my personal spending habits and areas I want to focus on, and ClarityMoney doesn’t allow that. It’s such a basic need, I really am surprised and disappointed. Even the stock list of categories it has is short and basic, making ClarityMoney about worthless for my purposes. Which is a bummer, it otherwise has a very friendly, visual appealing interface, and connected to the accounts very quickly. I will also mention, I briefly checked out the budget part of the tool and wasn’t impressed there either... even after coding our paychecks as “income”, I still had to add the totals up and enter my monthly income to start the process. Ok, annoying but whatever, then the next step it said that I had $0 monthly bills and to enter a number. Really?! My mortgage, utilities, etc, it couldn’t identify any of it?? So if I have to do ALL the heavy lifting of scrolling thru and adding up all my monthly payments what’s even the point of ClarityMoney ?!? Basically it’s just pretty...

by Runaway111111

I downloaded this in order to try and track my spending. However the budgeting feature is incredibly limited. For example, I split the bills with my boyfriend and send him money, but I can’t add that as a line item. It says I have “xyz” left to spend but it doesn’t detect any payment transfers so it just lumps it under “everything else”. Therefore I can’t automatically set aside a dollar amount out of the week.

Secondly the order of information is incredibly annoying. I don’t need half a screen telling me I just got paid, I get paid regularly it’s not that shocking. I have to scroll down through pseudo ads just to get to the sections I find the most valuable. I can’t dismiss a callout asking me to set up a high yield account, when I already have one set up before I downloaded ClarityMoney .

Finally, the UI is super annoying. I want to be able to quickly and easily see information, but instead I have to scroll through giant animations and icons to get to what I want. They go crazy with charts that ultimately don’t tell you much. Also please try and be more ADA compliant, their form fields are nearly impossible to read and I have 20/20 vision. They frequently have very thin light fonts on a bright background that makes the text appear to vibrate, or alternatively have dark font on a dark background which is equally bad. the whole thing looks like a dribbble designers wet dream — and that’s not a good thing.

by Lyfe$Sign

I saw an advertisement on Facebook for ClarityMoney and I always wanted a simple app to help me keep track of when my reoccurring expenses were going to withdraw out of my bank account. But some issues I observed within the first five minutes of having ClarityMoney , include: 1) The account balance is not exactly what my bank app tells me. And, this number takes time to update (which means I still have to use my bank app). 2) I can only see the five most recent transactions or most expensive transactions etc., from my account which is honestly strange under the premise that I should be able to at least see what I spent within the last month, since most reoccurring bills are on a monthly basis (which still means I have to use my bank app for that). 3) I cannot edit the names for reoccurring bills to simple words - some of these titles are long and complicated. 4) I don’t quite see the necessity of using such an app if I could just use use my calendar app to alert me of when my bills are going to come out (and how much) and use an Excel spreadsheet to list all my different types of expenses - NOTE: I understand we live in an app-based economy now and we all desire our goods and services to be conveniently accessible within a touch of a finger, but I think in regards to this, using traditional, less tedious methods my be more applicable here.

by Goddamnithanna

I’ve been looking for an app to replace Mint as it has become clunky and never updates. I thought Clarity would be the one, and it sure had the potential to be better than Mint, but it doesn’t do it for me.

1. The look. At first I thought it was a huge improvement to Mints bulky, ad riddled look. The more I used it though, I found myself getting tired of having to scroll. The boxes are far too big and some of them pointless. The graphs are barely readable for the sake of aesthetics. Having a whole tab for just accounts is odd, especially when it could be a dedicated budget section.

2. Which brings me to the main reason ClarityMoney can’t complete with Mint. The budget section is a mess. The idea is there but the execution is not. The most glaring issue is that it only lets you budget per week. Most people I know either get paid biweekly or monthly. I get that it’s trying to make it easier to grasp how much money you have day to day but a lot of my expenses aren’t going to be the same week to week. I know how much I spend on average in gas per month but it varies week to week how much I fill up. I don’t want to have to edit it constantly every week to compensate. If it would let you enter your monthly budget and then break it down into weeks, that could work.

Its got potential but it needs massive refining. Until then, Mint is unfortunately still the better choice.

by Sphinxlia

UPDATE: after the increase in spending categories and ability to more finely sort my income and expenses, I’d give Clarity a 4/5 stars. THAT BEING SAID, I’m currently on a trip to the UK and would love to look at my budget, but I’m unable to even log in to my account while abroad. This is particularly annoying given that a vacation is probably when one might like to budget...? Even a cached version of my budgets from the last couple months *should ideally* be available while outside the US.

OLD REVIEW: I, like many reviewers, switched after the close of Prosper Daily. I've been using Clarity for a full week, and I'm ambivalent, not fully satisfied. Here is my main issue: There are not enough spending categories. I find it particularly annoying that food and drink can't be categorized more finely. I don't want cocktails at a club and groceries for meal prep to be considered the same thing, ya dig? For now I will euphemistically call alcohol “entertainment” I guess.

by Sub1600

This such a promising app and I love to use it. However it baffles me that there are no simple budget tools. It’s just a pretty display of your money and where it goes. But it is fantastic at what it does don’t get me wrong (think other budget apps are way too cluttered). The accumulation of ALL of my banking into one app is beautiful. But just a simple function of notifying me when I’ve spent too much in a category would be a game-changer.

For example, let’s say I want to budget $40 a month for restaurants. I wish I could go in ClarityMoney , set a budget a notification, and then allow ClarityMoney to remind me when I go over that so that I don’t spend anymore on restaurants. I can deal without it, but not having that feature really limits the functionality of ClarityMoney .

Thank you for reading, I hope this didn’t come off as me bashing and ranting. I do love ClarityMoney and will continue to use it, I just think it has more potential. Thank you!

by Lizzylibra

I like what ClarityMoney is trying to do & some of the features offered can be very helpful for some who need or want the offers to help them. However, I just want something clean, straightforward, & to the point about helping me keep up on the transactions happening with my accounts. I was using a great app before that did this very well for me. It alerted me when new transactions came in and then I could 'swipe right' to confirm the transaction was familiar or 'swipe left' to red flag the unknown transaction till I could investigate further. This gave me a strong peace of mind that I was keeping a close watch on my accounts and would easily spot any unexpected behavior. ClarityMoney's home page gives you a quick synopsis of your account's balances, but then it has all these advertisements for money management and other suggestions that I read through the first time of course, but there are very few that you can remove from view for good. The second tab is cleaner on showing account activity, but I miss being able to mark them as known and unknown transactions. Doing so gave me a strong sense that I was able to keep a very close eye on monetary transactions. Still a good app to show what you need in a basic way so since the other app is now gone and they directed me to ClarityMoney I guess with time I will get used to the different way of things.

by Ljohnthorsson

I really enjoy ClarityMoney. It tracks my expenses really well and categorized them in a way that is friendly to my usage. The ability to change the category of each expense either one time or for all future transactions is also a very nice feature. It makes organizing my finances easy and intuitive. I see great things as ClarityMoney gains traction and the dev team can hone its functionality. Here’s my gripe: ClarityMoney has a SEVERE lag (I’m talking DAYS of lag) in displaying my account balances. So ClarityMoney CANNOT be the only app I use to track my balances and spending-I still have to use my bank’s app in order to see what I truly have in my accounts. Whether or not this is something that can be fixed or improved upon is not fore to speculate. If there is a way to improve the updating of account information and get it closer to real-time (bank time) I would STRONGLY recommend the dev team to tackle that before anything else. ClarityMoney is *SERIOUSLY WELL DONE* and its potential for near-perfect functionality is a very real thing. Thanks Clarity Team. A+!

by FayeRichardson

I came from Mint wanting to see if there was a better money tracker in ClarityMoney Store and ol behold Clarity. It's got a super clean and beautiful design. Linking my financial accounts was easy. The pie charts and data graphs showing how much I spent in each category and by month is very resourceful. I will say some transactions do not post in real time which to me isn't a big issue since I like to buget myself on a weekly basis or after every large purchase(s). One downfall of ClarityMoney compared to Mint is that there's no real budgeting for categories. Reiterating what I said before, they only give you a pie chart of what you're spending your money on per category. Whereas with Mint I can make separate budgets from anything from my beauty services (waxing, hands, nails) to gifts and music and not have everything go under 'Shopping'. It seems like Clarity is good for someone who just wants a general idea of where they're spending. I'm going to continue to use it and hopefully there will be an update. Until then, I'll be using both to track my spending.

by Pelipen

...Be aware that some (or many) of your primary credit accounts might not be able to be linked to this excellent app! Why?? I don’t know.

FOUR of my bigger accounts will not link to Clarity Money (3 accounts through Synchrony Bank and my biggest account through a large credit union). Unfortunately, the inability to either link these accounts NOR to allow me to add and manage them manually, myself, results in a ridiculously inaccurate summery of my REAL LIFE financial situation. This is a big sticking point with me...because the “fantasy-world” picture of my finances might “feel nice,” but it doesn’t help me manage my real-world payments!

IF a manual account entry feature (for those institutions that refuse to cooperate) could be added to ClarityMoney, then my frustrations would be resolved. I have corresponded, frequently, with the developers of Clarity Money; they have responded very promptly and courteously...Yet my issue remains unresolved. I’m beginning to think that I’d do best to delete ClarityMoney and stop wasting my time & energy.

Please understand that for the accounts that WILL link to ClarityMoney, the information is accurate and excellent! It COULD be extraordinary, with a few programming features—such as a manual account entry/management option. ...At least until such time that those institutions will permit a direct link.

by Mr. Bowchikawowo

The apps interface is very clean and not intimidating. Still you don’t feel like it’s to simple and you might lose money just by using it. You can customize the tiles that show up and it tracks account transactions very well. I’ve used Good-budget, Mint and a few others and this one is the one that works for me the best. However, some of the things that the other apps have that would be very nice is the ability to track expenses MONTHLY instead of weekly. A straight forward way to SHARE app access so all can have access and receive alerts. Be able to SPLIT expense amounts if day you buy something at Walmart that would consisted of multiple categories. They have done well to make updates and I hope they will continue to do so, it makes me feel like they are working behind the scenes to improve their product.

by Niranjan Saraf

I come from Billguard (daily prosper). The graphs and list of all transaction interface is nice. Two things it needs to improve
1. I can't see the deposit transactions on my checking accounts. My income is not posted automatically on transactions. Instead it asks me to enter my income manually and plots spend graph against manually entered income. If you can integrate the income direct deposits it would be great.
2. More spend categories needed - I would love to see more categories such as rent, restaurants, phone bill, bars and nightlife, online shopping etc.
If these two changes come in, I'd rate ClarityMoney a 5 star.
Update: my income was posted in wrong category (transfers), so I had to adjust it manually to set it as income. They got back to me with a response specific to my review. They care. Keep up the good work. I'm changing the rating from 3 star to 4 stars.

by Cbarfield1789

I love ClarityMoney. It provides such a good breakdown of your spending and where your money goes. There is not a whole lot you have to do; Clarity Money analyzes your spending for you and places each and every transaction you make into different categories such as bills, travel, shopping, food, etc. I’ve been very surprised how efficient it is in recognizing each transaction and placing them into the correct categories. Every now and then, you must reclassify one or two, but for the most part it’s rare that you must do so. ClarityMoney also offers an option to save money on a weekly or monthly basis with the built in Clarity Money Savings Account. There is also so much more.

Bottom line: if you are serious about keeping up with your budget and would like an easy way to do so, this is ClarityMoney for you. Honestly, ClarityMoney is for everyone with a bank account or credit card. I’ve not found anything easier to use.

by BillJaxon

I had a much older friend suggest that I need to keep track of every single cent that I spend. I always came up with excuses and basically was just too lazy to track my expenses on that level. The fact of the matter is that you will never really know what’s going on with your finances until you break it down to the cent and see where everything is going. Clarity Money is changing my life because it gives me a much better understanding of my finances and where my money goes. I’ve been using it for a couple of pay periods now and I can already see how it is working to my benefit. It helped me save and start investing in just a matter of days and made personal finance so much less stressful.