Fortune City is a great balance between gaming and function that makes tracking your expenses easy and engaging.
I’ve been a fan of adding gamification to a mundane tasks since I started using Habitica a few months ago. When I noticed that Google had awarded Fortune city with an Android Excellence award I knew that it was something that I had to test out.
Chinese studio Fourdesire is the team behind the app. The team has a knack for building apps that add a layer of gamification to everyday tasks. Working on its previous efforts, Plant Nanny and Walkr, helped the team refine their core idea of turning something boring into a game.
In terms of being a budgeting app, Fortune City is pretty standard. Users can input their transactions and monitor their spending. Although it doesn’t link to a bank account like popular budgeting apps PocketGuard or Mint.
In my opinion, it’s not as good as an actual budgeting app, but its hard to beat for tracking smaller daily transactions that are easy to forget about.
Once the user adds in their transactions they start to build their city. To add a transaction, users tap the ‘New Record’ button at the bottom of the screen and then choose what type of transaction they want to add. Users can choose from 10 different types of basic transactions, ranging from food and shopping to entertainment. Users can add some more less popular categories from the app’s settings page.
Every transaction lets the user construct a new building. The type of building depends on the type of transaction that’s inputted. Adding a food transaction adds a food-related building.
Users can also go back and analyze their transactions on the Analytics page. There are two ways to track analytics in the free version. The ‘Categories’ section shows users a pie chart of what they’re spending the most money on and the ‘statistics’ page that tracks spending by day.
There’s a paid version of Fortune City that costs $5.49 per month. The premium version is called the ‘Chief Financial Officer’ tier and it adds a few features that let users delve deeper into expense tracking.
The premium version lets users create a budget and monitor it right beside their monthly expenses. In addition to budgeting, users can also create a Watch List that allows them to track smaller purchases, like their daily coffee.
Premium users can also export all the data they tracked with Fortune City as a CSV file, so it’s easier to add to a spreadsheet.
The app is free to download and users can get it for iOS and Android.
