In this Frollo Review, discover why Frollo is a simple but excellent money management App that is completely free. The Frollo app gives you a complete view of all of your financial transactions. Simply connect your bank accounts, loans, credit cards and superannuation accounts, create and manage budgets, set financial goals and achieve financial independence.
Here are the main sections of this Frollo review and feel free to jump ahead.
Verdict
The Frollo app is a fantastic way to manage your finances in one app. All of your transactions, budgets and upcoming bills are visually displayed, easy to access, categorise and understand. Money management apps can change your life and provide visibility on all of your finances. Frollo gives you everything you need to budget and manage your money every day. And it is completely free.
MM highly recommends the Frollo app as a simple budgeting and money management app for any beginner that will help you save money, spend smarter and get ahead.
Please note, the app is also perfect for experienced budget app users that want a low touch, simple but effective way to manage all their accounts and budgets.
What Is the Frollo App?
Frollo is a money management app that was launched in 2015 by founder Gareth Gumbley. The intention of the app was to help people feel good about money. Frollo utilizes “Open Banking” to deliver a complete picture of your accounts, transactions and upcoming bills. It also delivers insights, automatic categorization and notifications to ensure you are on top of your personal finances. These features are all available within a secure app that recently won the Mozo best money management App of 2022.
How Does the Frollo App Work?
The Frollo app is simple to set up with minimal configuration required to get started.
Download the Frollo app and connect your bank accounts along with any other savings or credit card accounts. Once an account is connected, Frollo will load transactional data for the linked accounts into the app within minutes. The fun starts here as you explore the app.
Once an account is linked and you dig a little deeper, you will find some re-categorisation may be required. Frollo gets most categorization correct, so you will be able to jump straight in, set budgets and view trended data. This part of the journey is always the most interesting. This could be the first time you truly see how much money you spend in a month across all of your accounts. And you can answer questions like, how much money did I spend on groceries this month? Utilities? Fast food? Amazon deliveries?
People new to money management apps may get that “Oh Jeezus” moment. There is no where to hide, when faced with the reality of your transactions, neatly categorised and staring you in the face. This total visibility of spending behavior can be life changing. Being aware of spending across multiple accounts can change bad spending habits, improve money management and save money. And ultimately, Frollo users will slowly gain financial confidence and feel good about money.
Is the Frollo App Safe?
The Frollo app is very safe, as it uses bank grade security and no bank information is stored on your phone. Frollo operate and comply with strict bank sector security requirements as governed by APRA (a regulator of financial services in Australia).
The app utilizes Yodlee, a global leader in secure hosting and encryption of financial data. Yodlee is used by many International banks and trusted by over 70 million users worldwide. And Frollo cannot instigate any transactions, approve payments or fund transfers.
Is the Frollo App Free?
The Frollo app is 100% free. Frollo doesn’t sell your data, charge a subscription fee or offer any financial services or deals that it makes money from. Frollo builds financial well being technology that they sell to banks, fintechs and lenders.
Interestingly, the technology within the app utilizes the same technology that Frollo sell to their clients. While the app is free, they use the insights and usage data to improve their own technology and test new features. The app is a great marketing tool for Frollo, with customers such as Beyond Bank and BCU using the technology.
How Does Frollo Compare to Other Money Management Apps?
The Frollo app is a very clean and simple money management app. It gives you the essentials without being overly stuffed with too many features. It delivers your accounts, transactions, budgets, categorization of spending and bill tracking all in one app. This results in a fast, easy experience whenever the app is opened and used.
After testing out various money management apps since the closure of pocketbook (review here), I did find myself using Frollo multiple times a day. The responsiveness was similar to pocketbook, and the design was very simple to navigate. Some features within the app were really great, one in particular is amazing. These will be discussed in detail in a later section.
Without going into a money management app shootout, I enjoyed the simplicity of the app. The more I used it, the more I continued to log in to tweak budgets and categorisations. I had a bit of fun optimizing the app and finding the best way to use it.
Frollo doesn’t offer the gourmet experience of other apps, with social features, enhanced visualizations and deals or offers to save money. This could be overwhelming for some users. Frollo is a budgeting app that is perfect for beginners to connect their accounts and start their financial independence journey. It also offers more customisations for advanced users that have used similar apps before. Initially, I thought the app was pretty good. But that rating of good escalated rapidly when I discovered my favourite feature in Frollo…
What Is the Greatest Feature of the Frollo App?
The greatest feature of the Frollo App is what I call the Barefoot Investor Budget View.
Budgeting App beginners can get overwhelmed with categorizing transactions and budgeting for categories. This can take time to perfect and any budgeting app could be thrown into the too hard basket, financial wellness be damned. If you aren’t familiar with the Barefoot Investor’s buckets, here is a refresher:
The Frollo Barefoot Buckets gives a nice, high-level barefoot view of your spending, broken down into 4 categories.
- Income
- Living (60%)
- Lifestyle (20%)
- Savings (20%)
This view is fantastic if you have read the Barefoot Investor and keep your budget super simple. If you follow his 60%-20%-20% rule of budgeting, this screen is all you need. This view doesn’t let you set high-level budgets to track, like in the “My Budgets” view, but those three numbers make it nice and simple to manage your spending.
How to create Barefoot Buckets in Frollo?
To manage the barefoot bucket view, click into the high level categories and re-categorise any transactions into Living or Lifestyle. The Frollo App can save these categorization settings and any future transactions simply fall into the correct buckets with minimal changes required.
Being a Barefoot fan(atic), I was previously extracting data to replicate the barefoot buckets from budgeting apps and dumping them into excel once a week. Now I have a “Barefoot bucket” view in real-time. For example, if you earn 5000 a month. You need to watch the “expenses” view to make sure your living expenses don’t go over 3K (60%), and lifestyle (20%). And hopefully, your savings can reach 20% every month (1K each)
If you are a Barefoot Investor reader, the Frollo app is worth trying just for this feature alone. It’s not perfect but I love it. Those buckets keeps it nice and simple.
What Are the Best Features of the Frollo App?
The Frollo app is simple in design and execution. This is a market differentiator and simple is not a bad thing. Money management apps should help and not hinder you. Frollo offers budget app beginners a great experience to better manage their money and improve their finances. Here are my favourite features:
1. The Frollo App is Fast to Load and Easy to Use
If you have the need for speed, the Frollo app is fantastic. It is fast and light weight and loads with all of your financial data within a second. The speed is important, as Frollo lets you quickly jump in, look at your app and jump out. And there are no ads or offers clogging up screen space and slowing down the experience.
The design of the app makes it easy to use. There are three tabs to use.
- Dashboard – Everyday budgeting and transaction view
- Accounts – Accounts and transactions view
- Expenses – higher level, Living and Lifestyle (Barefoot bucket) View.
The Dashboard view has various sections within it, such as recent transactions, category budgets and upcoming bills. This dashboard view can be customized and the sections can be re-ordered from most important to least important. And sections that aren’t used can be easily hidden.
The Frollo app has a less is more approach to budgeting. There is no meaningless scrolling and searching, it’s all very simple and intuitive. If you just want to look at how much money you have in an account, or when a bill is due to be paid, it’s all a second away. The lightweight feel is perfect.
2. The Frollo App Has Tools to Create a Budget
Creating a detailed budget can be overwhelming. And deciding how much you should spend on groceries or entertainment can also be difficult. Luckily, Frollo can help when you are ready to create a budget.
Setting individual budgets is a simple exercise. If for example, you are spending too much money on eating out at restaurants. In your budget view, set a budget for “Restaurants” and Frollo will provide some data on that category. such as:
- Amount spent last month
- Amount spent in the last 6 months
- Recommended budget amount.
The recommended budget for the category is a nice way to get started. While more ambitious goals can be a set in future when the user is ready to really knuckle down.
It may take some time to calibrate your category level budgets to align with your living/lifestyle budgets. I found my budgets evolved over time and Frollo makes it simple to tweak and manage when needed.
3. Frollo Has Automatic Bill Tracking
Budgeting should be simple, with “No alarms and no surprises please.”
Frollo provides automatic bill tracking to reduce the chance of bill shock. Frollo recognizes bills that are paid, then adds them to your “Upcoming Bills” list. And any bills that are not recognized can be set as a “bill”. Simply select a billing period (monthly, quarterly) and a date to add it to automatic bill tracking.
This feature is great to keep track of upcoming bills and it allows you to forecast your expenses. If you have $924 worth of bills coming this month, you may need to adjust your other spending to allow for it.
After using Frollo long enough, it is easy to plan ahead with your bills set within the app. At the start of each month you can plan ahead confidently. You will know exactly how much money you need for scheduled bills. This feature is flexible and really useful to manage your finances every month.
4. Frollo Gives You a Net Worth Dashboard
You don’t need to be a big New York businessman to think about Net Worth. Everyday Australians do it too!
Frollo’s lets you connect to hundreds of banks and financial institutions and displays them in an Account view. If you have various bank loans, spending and savings accounts, you can get a complete view of your assets and liabilities in the one view.
Frollo’s “Accounts” view displays your accounts in the following groups:
- Bank accounts (everyday accounts, spending accounts)
- Savings Accounts (purely used for savings)
- Loan Accounts (home loans etc)
For budget app beginners, this view is fantastic. Unfortunately, Frollo doesn’t connect to everything. For example, Frollo does not have a connection to my credit card (HSBC) or superannuation (HostPlus). It also doesn’t connect to my Buy Now Pay Later card (Zip). This isn’t a deal breaker, but Frollo does cover most of the well-known institutions. And this all in one view of your accounts is unbelievably valuable.
5. Frollo Gives You Insights on Your Budget and Spending
Not all budgeting app users want to log in everyday and manage their spending. Frollo has insights and notifications that can alert the user on their phone like a standard app notification. This can be handy for budget alerts, for example, if you are close to hitting your budget in a category. It can also send alerts if there are insufficient funds in your account for an upcoming bill.
These notifications can be turned off and can be received in app only. This is more subtle for users that log in everyday, and don’t need the extra phone notification, which is a nice feature.
Frollo is a financial coach in your pocket. It gives a little nudge to help keep your budget on track even when it’s not top of mind. It’s really important and it provides the rails to not forget about budgets and financial goals. Frollo has your back.
What Are the Not-So Great Features of the Frollo App
No app is perfect, and Frollo is not an exception to that rule. In the name of balance, here are a few things that I noticed. But please note, these minor things didn’t stop me from using the app every-single-day.
1. Frollo Can Not Add Manual Transactions into the App
The Frollo app does not allow transactions to be manually entered. Frollo only allows transactions captured via your linked accounts to be visible in the app. This works really well but if I’m thinking in Barefoot mode, it would be great to add in how much I saved each month. So if my Income is 5K, I spent 4K in total for the month, it would be great to add 1K I saved into the app. Then I could view how much I saved every month within the app.
2. Frollo Has No Desktop and No Data Export Feature
The Frollo app is designed to be simple. So data analysts and number crunchers be aware, you can’t jump into a desktop app, extract data and build custom charts. And you cannot extract data from your app.
Saying that, I’ve become less obsessive about exporting and number crunching because Frollo won’t let me do it. I’ve built a simpler approach and I haven’t really lost anything in the process. Frollo does 99% of what I need within the app. So maybe this is a positive?
3. Frollo Can Be a Little Touchy When Scrolling
When scrolling through the app, it can be a little touchy sometimes. For example, my scrolling will open up a chart or go to a page because of what I pressed. Not a big deal but worth noting here.
4. Frollo Could Have More Charts with Percentages to Manage Spending
My absolute favourite feature of the Frollo app is the “Expenses” view, which I call the “Barefoot Budget” View. It would be amazing to apply budget percentages to those living and lifestyle budget amounts. For example, if I had a 3K budget on living, it would tell me how much I have remaining within that budget lifestyle category. A higher level budget would be amazing – but might be confusing for some people?
The “Total Budget Left” number is hidden away in the “Dashboard” view, when you click into “MyBudgets”. And the number is really small too. I’d love that number to be big and get its own section on the Dashboard view. That number is important and should be more prominent. I want to see it every day.
Luckily, the Frollo team are active and have a long list of features on their roadmap to improve the app, which is great. The top of their list is custom categorization of transactions, which seems to be a pain point for most Frollo users.
Please note: This view only exists in MM’s heart and mind. Not real.
Frollo Review: Final Thoughts
Budgeting apps are really important, and they can be life changing. Notorious spenders can get visibility across all their accounts, to really understand how much they are spending. That visibility is so important, and that is why Frollo is fantastic in providing that visibility. It really can be life changing. So it is worth downloading the app if you really want to improve the way you manage money.
Personally, after Pocketbook shut down, I downloaded various apps to see what works best for me. I found myself gravitating towards Frollo because it was simple, fast and the clincher for me was the “Super categories”, that emulated the Barefoot Investor budget buckets. The Lifestyle and Living categories, made my budgeting and money management really simple.
Although I still use other money management apps, I find myself logging into Frollo multiple times a day and it has become my favourite. I encourage anyone to try the app as it is free, load your accounts into it and see what you think. It is a simple way to manage your money and get ahead in your saving.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
M. Moneyman
Frollo Review: FAQs
What Is Open Banking?
Open Banking is a new system where banks can allow their data to be used by third parties via an API (Application Programming Interface). This means your financial information from most banks and financial institutions can be safely accessed within one App (such as Frollo).
This data sharing between banks gives you a complete view of your financial position. It also gives you the freedom to view your finances outside of your native banks app or website. Sharing your data is safe and opens up new possibilities for new experiences and services.
Do All of Frollo’s Bank Connections Use Open Banking?
Frollo has Open banking functionality with approximately 80 providers, and screen scraping for approximately 400.
How Do I Know If My Frollo Bank Connection Is an Open Banking Connection?
The Frollo app identifies an Open Banking provider with the “bank name (CDR)”, while screen scraping option is identified with just ‘Bank name’.
What Is Screen Scraping?
Screen scraping is an automated method of sharing financial information to third parties by simply providing bank account credentials (identification and password). The application will use a software robot to log in and ‘scrape’ information from the screen.
Is Screen Scraping Safe?
screen scraping is unregulated, unreliable and it can present potential security risks.
Companies such as Frollo are phasing out screen scraping, where an open banking solution is available. And a number of banks are blocking the practice with their customers data.
