Monthly Expense

Your monthly budget can be pretty tight, but this doesn’t mean you run out of money by the end of the month, especially with a well-planned budget. On the bright side of things, there are various specialized applications like Monthly Expense which help you get an idea of how much you spend in order to fix some issues.

One first note is that the application requires .NET Framework 1.1 to function, and even to go through with the setup process. On the bright side, a download link is suggested in the first steps of the setup process, and you might want to install it, even if running modern Windows iterations, which might not be fitted by default with this old edition.

As far as the visual design is concerned, the application keeps things simple, with different preset fields to fill in with numerical values. The overall layout is clean, and there’s little to no problem accommodating with what it puts at your disposal.

Effort on your behalf is minimum since all expense fields are already defined. However, it would have been useful to see additional fields in case there are more things you spend money on, other than what the program provides. The default options let you track food items, car payment, clothes, mortgage, taxes, and utilities.

Apart from these fields, you also need to fill in the monthly income. Currency is of no relevance here, so you can easily adapt numbers to your own. The only downside to the whole operation is that you can’t generate a report to view the difference between months to be able to improve your balance.

On an ending note, Monthly Expense is a lightweight application which doesn’t really provide a great deal of control over budget calculus, but makes it easy to get an idea why there’s little cash left in your pocket by the end of the month.