Copilot Review: A Budgeting App that Finally Gets it Right? (2024)
Update: It’s come to my attention that the team at Copilot are ever the strategists and are working on an integration to import data from Mint in light of the news that Intuit is shuttering the platform. What did I tell you? User-friendly kings & queens.
I should disclose upfront that I used to work professionally in user experience strategy, design, and writing—so when an app has a really stellar UI, I get jazzed.
Copilot vs. Mint
While I was always a Mint purist (“And if it doesn’t work for you, you’re just not trying hard enough!” I’d say when people would tell me it just wasn’t working), the more my recommendation was met with hesitancy, the more I felt compelled to find a solution for budgeting that would do for spending what Betterment did for investing. I was on the hunt.
My friend Richard is a quintessential Silicon Valley tech buff (a 2x start-up founder, no less), and when I told him about Money with Katie, the first thing he said was: “Cool! Have you ever heard about Copilot? All my friends love it. The UI is fantastic—one of the founders was a software engineer at Google.”
I downloaded it so quickly, my App Store almost crashed. Then I saw it: the price.
“Aw, man. This costs money? Shit. Never mind.”
But I noticed the demo mode, and it was enough to pique my interest. I played around with the dummy data and immediately felt envious. Then, a few months passed, and curiosity finally got the best of me. I didn’t want Copilot to be the one that got away.
Now, several years later, I’m especially glad I didn’t let my cheapness get the best of me, as news broke recently that Intuit is shuttering Mint at the end of 2023.
How to budget in general
While it may be obvious, I want to make sure we’re on the same page here: I don’t use the budgeting app to decide what my budget should be (though Copilot does analyze your spending and give you accurate estimates for each category).
I used my Wealth Planner back in January to determine how I was going to spend this year, and then simply created those budgets in Copilot so the app would track my spending (that way, I don’t have to keep track of my transactions and spending manually).
At the end of the month, I record the category totals in my Wealth Planner for accountability and record-keeping. The Wealth Planner is built to give you end-of-month and end-of-year summaries, because data is sexy and makes you rich. Obviously.
How to set up Copilot
I had heard Copilot was really “smart”; that it was a budgeting app that understood real life.
But I have to admit, when I first started syncing all of my accounts (which, by the way, were all available in the app with the exception of my obscure HSA fund), I was a little overwhelmed. Months of unrefined data poured in, and I had a brief moment of panic: As someone who checks, categorizes, and combs through her Mint data multiple times a day, seeing the last year of my life begin to populate willy-nilly in the app freaked me out and I almost aborted the mission.
I’m so glad I didn’t.
The first thing that I had to do (after syncing my accounts) was begin correcting or approving Copilot’s estimates. Most of them were freakishly spot-on, but some of them required additional tweaking on my part. I noticed that normally happened for categories where I paid for something and then got reimbursed for someone else’s half (think utilities, groceries, rent, etc.). The estimate would guess double my actual out-of-pocket cost because the transactions themselves were twice as big.
The good news? It was actually pretty easy to assign the correct Venmo charges to the right categories. This was one of the cool things I noticed right away:
Most of the time, I get reimbursed via Venmo for certain transactions (a) for around the same amounts and (b) around the same time of month for each purchase that I split. I set up rules (pictured below) to accommodate those.
Now, when a Venmo transaction happens around the 15th for around $75, it already knows that’s a mobile phone reimbursement for half of our phone plan—which means I don’t have to manually classify it every single time.
And speaking of recurring transactions, it analyzes your data to determine (a) what your recurring charges are and (b) when they happen. Then, it builds it into your spending already at the beginning of the month as if the money has already been spent—that way you don’t go on your merry way through your month thinking you’re hella under-budget only to be surprised by your $160 electric bill on the 21st and blow your own lead.
Here’s the electric example. I was getting reimbursed for half of the cost of our electricity, which was around the same amount and around the same time every month. Coincidentally, it was also around the same amount and time as the mobile phone reimbursement, and I have no idea how it was able to tell—but so far, so good. Since then, they’ve introduced a really slick Venmo integration.
This screen gave me heartburn at first, but I just went through one by one and categorized things appropriately. If I didn’t recognize the charge at all, I deleted it, and would go back later and re-add the Venmo reimbursements back in. As noted, this is no longer an issue because they’re (to my knowledge) the only budgeting app that pipes in Venmo data directly. 12/10.
Here’s where your Recurring charges live each month. As you can see, at the time of this screenshot, it told me that I had already paid $985 worth of them, but still had $231 left to pay.
Your Recurring charges live in their own section of the app, so you can keep track of what’s already been paid and what’s still remaining each month.
While setting the actual budget amounts and making sure all the Recurring charges took a little time (probably about half an hour), I’ve been really impressed at how easy it’s been to keep up with and how little ongoing effort it takes.
Something silly that I’ll admit I loved about Copilot
You can change category names, colors, and emojis really easily. And while it’s silly to admit, I really liked that aspect of the personalization.
Everything works the way you expect it to: Want to change something? Just tap it. Options pop up. It’s not hard to operate, which is crucial for an app that facilitates something as painful for some as budgeting.
I also liked that I could group certain budgets into categories: rather than having a ton of different house-related budgets strewn throughout a long list of bullshit, I have a “Household” category with rent, electric, gas, trash, water, and more nested within it. Same goes for “Food” as a broader category with “Groceries” and “Restaurants” within it.
After you’ve set up your Copilot app
I quickly got to know the major sections of the app because they make really good use of all the real estate:
Accounts, where you’ll see all your synced accounts and your assets and debt
Transactions, where it tracks each and every transaction (another cool thing that I picked up on here: internal transfers between accounts are marked with a little “T” and income is marked with a little “I,” so you don’t have to worry about classifying those transactions since it already understands—this was a departure from budgeting apps I’ve used in the past where it felt like every single thing had to be accurately classified, lest it throw something off)
Dashboard, which I’d consider the main area, where you can see a visual for your spending to date, your budget overview (overages are highlighted here), upcoming recurring payments, and income to date
Categories, which is where your budget categories are listed and the “Spent” amount is tracked against the budgeted amount
Recurring, which we’ve already discussed
One small thing worth highlighting here: I noticed there were no ads on this platform.
Obviously, Mint had to make money somehow, so it advertised to its users (no shame in that game; my platform is also ad-supported). You’ve probably noticed that several sections of the Mint app/website are glorified advertising placements for their partners, not actual budgeting tools. That always irritated me; I felt like I used “Transactions” and “Budgets,” and that was it (because the other sections weren’t “real”).
Because you pay for Copilot, they don’t have to advertise to you—so every section of their app is actually useful and “real.”
How to use Copilot in an ongoing way
I might be a unique case study since I f***ing love tracking my spending, but I use Copilot like it’s Instagram now. I’m in that shit constantly. I checked my screen time report, and it’s consistently clocking in as one of my top 5. What can I say? I told you I liked data!
When you open the app, it pulls up the dashboard and highlights transactions that have happened since you last logged in, organized by day. You can click “Mark as Reviewed” to let the app know you’ve signed off on them. It’s pretty slick. I’d guess that about 20% of the time, I have to recategorize the transaction, but that takes all of 8 seconds to click the category and select a new one. They recently pushed out a new AI feature called “Copilot Intelligence,” and I’ve noticed a significant improvement in its ability to recognize patterns and categorize transactions accurately in the last few months.
That’s something I appreciate about their team: They push new features thoughtfully, and when I get a notification something new is coming, I know they’re going to overdeliver.
Rebalancing budgets
One cool feature I stumbled upon when playing around was the “Rebalance Budgets” treatment. It essentially uses your actual behavior to determine the most optimal way to shift your budgets, but without changing the total amount spent. It reallocates the dollars to the categories where you’re actually spending money, which improves accuracy over time.
Here’s how the “Categories” page looks. You can see at a glance how the red budgets mean I’m over, and the red outlined boxes mean the recurring charge predicted is greater than what I set the budget for. I love the view at the top that tells me “Spent So Far” and “Total Budget” with the visual to represent which categories are consuming the most of my spending.
As you can see, the app was smart enough to tell me the exact way I could optimize my budget.
Notifications
I’m a freak about notifications most of the time (I turn most of them off), but with banking apps, I’m really paranoid. I have every bank app’s transaction alerts turned on ever since my identity got stolen in 2019 so I’m alerted immediately if there’s suspicious activity. With Copilot, I went ahead and gave them full permission to send me whatever they wanted. Blow me up, Copilot. Give me your worst.
It was a “green checkmark” spree as I went through my notifications settings, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how respectful the notifications are—I actually don’t feel like I’m getting blown up at all. I tried to go back in my Notification Center to screenshot a sampling, and there weren’t any there…because I’ve clicked on every single one. Clearly, even in the fugue state in which I typically use my phone, I’m entranced enough with the notifications that I engage with them.
Usually, they pertain to spending updates, categorizing new transactions, or letting you know you got #paid.
The cost
All right, people. Back to the elephant in the room.
The original reason I was #out on Copilot was because it costs money. It’s $13 per month (or, as college Katie would say, two burrito bowls) if you subscribe monthly, or $7.92 per month if you subscribe for the year upfront.
Because I’m a #moneyblogger, I decided upfront it was market research (and therefore a #BusinessExpense! Thanks, IRS). But after using it, I wholeheartedly believe it’s worth the expense, especially if it finally gets you to interact with your spending and track your budgets on a regular basis.
How to try Copilot for free
If you’re interested in doing the free trial, you can easily sign up when you download the app and begin the onboarding. Entering the Invite Code KATIE2M will get you two months free. (I do not make a commission from this code.)
In my mind, the fact that they offer a free trial is a low-risk way to confirm or deny whether or not it works for you, and I’d recommend using it for at least a month before deciding (hence the helpfulness of the code that doubles the trial length, no?!).
Since you can cancel any time, I don’t see a downside to trying it out—especially if you’ve cursed my name every time I recommended Mint to you.
Or, download directly from the App Store here.
Copilot has been a sponsor of the Money with Katie newsletter in the past, but they had no input in this particular blog post or the opinions expressed herein.
