Budgeting app ExpenZa hits surge in user activity, R1-billion transactions

Budgeting apps will never go out of style. Until people stop worrying about where their precious money is mysteriously disappearing, personal finance management tools such as ExpenZa won’t get old. The company has recently announced that it has had a surge of user activity in the last three months and has processed transactions worth more than R1-billion.

Based in Stellenbosch, South Africa, ExpenZa is an app available to Android users with the need to effectively organize their income and expenses. The app saw user activity increase since its latest update in October and during the high-volume retail period leading up to last year’s shopping season. ExpenZa CEO Gabriel Roux says that more than 450 000 transactions have been made. She further explains:

“We saw an average of 3 200 transactions processed by ExpenZa per day, with obvious spikes in the number of transactions during the high-volume retail period leading up to Christmas. Alarmingly, we saw a substantial difference in the total amount spent compared to the amount earned during the same period, which is indicative of our country’s lack of a proper savings culture.”

ExpenZa aims to address the South African citizens’ need for easy financial management. This is mainly done by using data contained in the transactional SMSs sent by banks and user-assigned budget or expenditure categories. Penny pinchers can rest assured knowing where their money’s going.

ExpenZa currently integrates SMSs from all leading banks, including ABSA, Capitec, FNB, Nedbank, Standard Bank, Rand Merchant Bank, Investec, Go Banking and Discovery Card. While most of these banks do not send notification SMSs if the value of the transaction is less than R100, ExpenZa’s upcoming update will allow users to upload their bank statements manually.

According to Roux, the new update is scheduled for an early-February release. “We’ve worked closely with our community of users to identify new functionality and will be releasing a comprehensive update that will address some of the issues identified in the last release.”

ExpenZa hopes to become a valuable tool for personal financial management as well as eventually SMEs by introducing graphs and other tools to help businesses budget accurately and effectively.