We build one of these, so take the recommendation at the end with whatever salt you like. The eight checks themselves are not about us — they are the things we watched people get wrong before they found us, and they apply whichever app you end up choosing.
The core problem: the expense tracking market was built in places where spending is card-based, salaries land in a bank, and an app can read your transactions automatically. Pakistan is not that market. A large share of spending is cash, a large share of the rest moves through JazzCash and Easypaisa, and most of the well-known international apps have their single best feature disabled from the moment you install them.
1. Does manual entry feel like a first-class feature?
In an app built around bank sync, manual entry is the fallback: three screens deep, more fields than you need, clearly not where the design effort went. You will be using that path several times a day, every day.
Test it before you commit. Install the app and log five expenses the way you actually would — quickly, one-handed, standing up. If it takes longer than putting your wallet away, you will stop within a fortnight. That is not a prediction about you; it is what happens to nearly everyone.
2. Does it handle rupees properly?
Not "does it have a currency setting" — most do. Whether the amounts read naturally. Whether a four-figure grocery bill looks like a normal purchase rather than an alarming one. Whether reports and exports carry the currency through instead of dropping back to a dollar sign somewhere in the middle.
This sounds cosmetic and it is not. You are going to look at these numbers every day for months, and numbers that read wrong make the whole thing feel like it is not quite for you.
3. Is the free plan free, or a trial in disguise?
This is the check that costs people the most and gets skipped the most often, because you do not find out until month two. Three questions to answer before you put any data in:
- Is a card required at signup? If yes, it is a trial.
- Does anything expire after 7, 14 or 30 days? If yes, it is a trial.
- If I stop paying, what happens to what I already entered? This is the important one.
There is a meaningful difference between an app that stops letting you add a fourth budget and an app that hides your history behind a paywall. The first is a limit. The second is holding your own records hostage, and by the time you discover which you have, you have six months of data in there.
4. Can you get your data out?
Export to CSV should be available without a support ticket, without a queue, and ideally without a subscription. It matters for two reasons: it is your data, and it is your exit. An app you can leave is an app you can safely commit to.
While you are looking, check that account deletion exists and is self-service. An app that makes you email someone to delete your financial records is telling you something about how it thinks about ownership.
5. Does it work offline?
Signal at a basement supermarket checkout is exactly where you need to log an expense and exactly where you often cannot. An app that shows a spinner at that moment breaks the habit at its weakest point.
Installable web apps and native apps both handle this; a plain website does not. If you are choosing an installable web app, check it actually opens with the network off rather than assuming it will.
6. Is it honest about bank sync?
Automatic bank import is genuinely useful where it works. Coverage for Pakistani banks is limited, and an app that advertises it prominently without saying which banks are supported is setting you up to find out after signup.
There is a reasonable position on the other side too, which is to not connect to banks at all. Aggregation usually means handing a third party credentials to your accounts. Casshi does not do bank sync for that reason — you add transactions by typing, speaking, photographing a receipt or importing a CSV your bank already gives you. Whichever you prefer, pick it deliberately rather than discovering it later.
7. Does it do the thing you actually need, not the thing it is best at?
Apps in this category cluster into four shapes, and the mismatch between what you need and what the app is for is the most common reason people bounce between three of them in a month:
| Shape | Best for | Weak at |
|---|---|---|
| Simple logger | Seeing where the money goes, fast daily entry | Planning ahead, splitting with other people |
| Budget planner | Category limits and mid-month warnings | Nothing, if you never set limits — then it is overhead |
| Bill splitter | Flatmates, trips, shared household costs | Your own personal spending, usually not covered |
| Full personal finance app | All of the above in one account | More surface than someone who just wants a logger needs |
Be honest about which row you are in. Someone who wants to know where their salary goes does not need net worth charts, and someone splitting a flat three ways needs a running balance per person that most personal trackers simply do not have.
8. What happens to the data you are handing over?
You are about to give something a complete record of where you go, what you buy and how much you earn. Before you do, find the privacy policy and check three things: whether the data is sold or shared with advertisers, whether deletion is genuinely available to you, and whether there is a real party named as responsible rather than just a brand.
A finance app with no findable privacy policy and no contact address is not a small red flag.
The shortlist, honestly
If you want the summary rather than the method: a spreadsheet is a completely legitimate answer if you are disciplined, because it does everything except be in your pocket and warn you. A paper register is a legitimate answer too, for the reasons in our hisab kitab guide. Most people who fail at both fail at the recording step, and an app fixes the recording step specifically.
Among apps, choose on the eight checks above rather than on the length of the feature list, and weight checks 1 and 3 highest. Fast entry decides whether you keep using it. A free plan that does not hold your history hostage decides whether that was a good idea.
Casshi was built against exactly this list: rupees or dollars, no bank connection, works offline as an installable app, unlimited transactions and categories on a free plan with no card and no expiry, CSV and PDF export, and nothing hidden if you stop paying. You can see the detail on the expense tracker, budget planner and split expenses pages, and decide for yourself whether it passes.