Budgeting isn't fun. Crunching numbers and tracking expenses is dull, tedious work we try to avoid at all costs, but it's a necessary fact of life — especially when you've got a couple of car bills and a mortgage. BUDGT understands our pain. With a delightfully simple interface and deceptively powerful money-managing tools, BUDGT will keep a close watch on your daily expenses — so long as you're willing to spend a little time with it each day.

Unlike Mint or Pageonce, BUDGT doesn't sync with your credit card and checking accounts, so you'll have to enter all of your recurring bills to get started. It seemed daunting at first, but the interface is so charming, we had entered a month's worth of expenses before we knew it. And as we mapped out our finances, BUDGT calculated what we had left to spend, leaving us with a pie to start slicing up.

Simplicity is paramount here, but that doesn't come at the expense of functionality. After setting up your usual monthly budget — hidden behind a dollar symbol if you need to change anything — BUDGT uses big, bold numbers and customizable categories to track every purchase you make, divvying your available funds into daily and monthly allowances. As you enter each transaction, you'll see your spending circles shrink accordingly, with color-coded slices to help pinpoint any potential budgeting pitfalls.

BUDGT is currency agnostic, so if you're traveling overseas, a travel mode automatically multiplies purchases by a determinate factor; it's not quite the killer feature it could be, but it still gives a decent estimate of conversion rates. Transactions can't be edited, so if you make a mistake, you'll need to delete and reenter, a mild inconvenience. You can set a daily alert to remind you to input the day's transactions, but we still would like to see future versions sync with our accounts.

The bottom line. The missing "E" stands for effort, but BUDGT looks so great that you won't mind.