Shopping Companion (formerly Grocery Companion)

When paying a visit to the grocery store and especially when you are shopping for more people than yourself, lists are the best way to make sure you do not come home without missing something important.

With a clear and self-explanatory name, Shopping Companion is a streamlined and simple piece of software designed from the ground up to help you create comprehensive grocery lists and make sure you stay on budget.

Subsequent to its installation and upon first opening the app, you are met by a well-organized main window that features a small menu bar and a comprehensive toolbar. Most of the application's main features are always within an arm's reach and only at a click away.

This being an organizing utility, it comes as no surprise that you can add and manage multiple shopping lists, named 'trips'. In order to use the application, you need to start building up a database of products.

Shopping Companion offers you the possibility to do just that with the help of fields like store, aisle, product, brand, category, unit, price, per unit price, discount amount and quantity. It even allows you to take into account coupons that can be used for discounts.

Besides importing and exporting shopping lists from and to text-based files, the app can help you print your comprehensive grocery databases. Of course, you can sort transactions using parameters like Store, Aisle Number, Category, Product, Brand, Size and Unit Per Unit Price, just to name a few.

As far as customization options are concerned, Shopping Companion cannot really offer a lot, as you can only change the font types and colors and not much else. The utility enables you to backup all your data to a single ZIP file.

However good the app might be, you would have to ask yourself who would use this app. Sure, Shopping Companion is a good app with streamlined workflow and a decent amount of features, but it somewhat feels outdated.

It does not have synchronization or advanced cloud-based backup features and neither does it come with a mobile-based version, things that would make any shopping-related app quite useful in our day and age.