Watching Over Money

You open it, close it, and reopen it at least twice a day. One of your most important storage devices, your wallet, has evolved over the years to an important financial tool and a personal journal. Storing receipts, bills, paper money, coins, credit or debit cards, your driver’s license and even your local supermarket membership card, your wallet is perhaps the most important piece in your pocket or purse.

But keeping score of your week’s spending and managing to stay under your budget’s limit, is something that needs more precise effort than frequently checking the amount of cash you have left inside your wallet’s compartments. Special tools, such as software applications, most of them stored in the memory of an electronic device like a personal computer or a blackberry, are extensively used for similar purposes since they assist contemporary busy individuals handle their finances, apart from their daily schedules. But these types of technologies cannot work without the necessary feedback from their user, meaning that the data needed to configure the spending limits of a person have to be entered into the system-or software program-from the...