A budget app for students on the Free plan

A student budget has three awkward habits. The money arrives in a few big payments instead of a monthly salary. A lot of it is spent in cash, which no statement tracks. And the weekly shop often includes toilet paper for the whole house. The method below handles all three on paper, in a spreadsheet, or on Sorayli without paying anything.

01What the Free plan gives you

Sorayli has no student plan. The Free plan is the same for everyone and needs no card to sign up.

Sorayli runs on the web and in the iPhone and Android apps, which share one ledger. It never connects to a bank, so it counts only what you scan or type. If you study abroad, choose the currency you spend day to day as your base currency at setup. Purchases in other currencies are converted at a daily rate on every plan, but changing the base currency later takes Pro or Family.

02Make ten scans last the month

A scan costs the same whether the receipt has one line or twenty, so scan the long ones and type the short ones. The weekly grocery shop is the best use of a scan. One photo, and the receipt scanner reads every item, its price and the total. Each item becomes its own entry, grouped under the receipt, and you check the lines before you save them.

That one scan turns ten items into ten entries. The member saving is printed under the coffee, so it belongs to that item: the coffee is read at $5.99 and the saving does not become an entry of its own. A discount taken off the whole order would be spread across all the items in proportion. Either way, the entries add up to the $45.71 you paid. This shop printed no tax line. If yours adds sales tax on top of the prices, add the tax as its own item on the check screen before you save, because the item entries leave it out.

Four grocery shops and two bigger runs use six scans, which leaves four for the month's surprises. If a scan fails or Sorayli cannot read the photo, the scan is handed back. A photo of something that is not a receipt still uses one, apart from the first each month. To type a day's small purchases on iPhone, use Save & add another: it keeps the type, currency and date, clears the rest, and puts you back on the amount.

03Turn term money into a weekly number

Student income rarely arrives monthly. A loan or grant payment lands at the start of term, a campus job pays a little each week, and summer work pays in bigger chunks. A budget built from what came in this month looks rich in September and broke by October.

The fix is to budget per stretch between big payments, not per month:

1. 1Add up the money you will have until the next big payment: the term payment, job pay you can count on, and any savings you set aside for this term.
2. 2Subtract the fixed costs for the same stretch: rent, your phone, a transit pass, anything you pay whatever you do.
3. 3Divide what is left by the number of weeks until the next payment. That is your weekly spending money.
4. 4For a monthly budget, multiply the weekly number by 52 and divide by 12.

In Sorayli, log the term payment as income on the day it arrives, under Other Income, and your job pay under Salary & Wages. The Total Balance figure is all the income you have logged minus all the spending, not a bank balance, so it only means something if you log both sides. There is more on this in the guide to budgeting with irregular income.

04Put your two budgets where the money moves

Two budgets are enough if you place them well. In the example:

• Food & Dining, monthly, at $280 of the $650. Groceries and eating out are the biggest spending you control week to week. Set the alert at 75% so you hear about it with time left to adjust.
• All categories, monthly, at your fixed costs plus your spending money: $650 + $650 = $1,300. It catches everything else, like a night out, a phone bill that went up, or the textbook you forgot about.

A budget counts only expenses filed under its exact category, so keep food in Food & Dining. Each month starts from zero, with no rollover. Alerts arrive by email, and as a push on iPhone if you turn push on. They come from a scheduled check, not the moment you pay. On Free, a third budget is refused until you delete one. The details are on the page about how budgets and alerts work.

05Cash goes in on the spot

Cash is where student budgets leak. Your statement shows the $40 you took out and never what it bought, so your own log is the only record.

• Log the purchases, not the withdrawal. The add form offers only Expense or Income, so logging both counts the same money twice.
• Scan a cash receipt like any other. The example receipt above was paid in cash, and Sorayli reads the payment method when the receipt prints it.
• No receipt, as at a market stall or when you pay a friend back for pizza: type it in before you walk away.
• No signal: the iPhone app shows your records from its last sync within the past week, but cannot save anything, and nothing waits to send later. Keep the receipt and add it when you are back online.

06In a shared house, log your share

Sorayli has no bill-splitting feature and no way to request money from housemates. It records your spending, so the question is which part is yours. On the example receipt, the milk, coffee and toilet paper are for a house of four. After the coffee saving they cost $18.76, so each share is $4.69 and your housemates owe you $14.07.

Logging your share keeps the budgets honest, so pick it when every dollar counts. The scanned photo stays with its entry, which helps when someone asks what they owe. For rent and bills split evenly, type in your share each month and mark it as repeating, monthly. A reminder email then lists it when it is due within 3 days. Marking it does not log next month's charge for you, so you still add each one. The guide to splitting a grocery receipt with roommates covers uneven splits.

07Summer is a different budget

Summer turns the problem around: more income, and a gap to fill before the next term.

1. 1At the start of summer, edit both budget limits to summer numbers. Rent may stop or change, and food may cost less at home.
2. 2Work out next term's gap now: its fixed costs plus its spending money, minus the term payment and the job pay you expect. In the example, that gap was the $720 saved from summer.
3. 3Set that amount aside as each paycheck arrives, before it turns into spending.
4. 4Log summer pay as income as it comes in. The $720 is a number for planning. When term starts, do not log it as income again, because it was already counted when you earned it.

08When Pro is worth it

For most students, Free is enough, and running out of scans is not a lockout because typing stays unlimited. Pro costs $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year. It is worth it if you keep running out of scans before the month ends, want more than two budgets, or need CSV export on the web. Pro has no monthly scan limit, with a fair-use cap of 300 scans a month, and no limit on budgets. You can compare the plans before deciding.