Moneytree’s expense tracking feature lets you separate work spending from personal stuff

Following the introduction of loyalty card tracking over the summer, Tokyo-based personal finance app Moneytree today announced the addition of expenses – the startup’s first paid feature.

Moneytree’s expenses feature allows users to separate work-related expenses from personal spending, organize them into a claim, and then download the claim from the cloud as a CSV or Excel file. The add-on costs JPY 500 a month (US$4.40) or JPY 5,000 (US$44) per year. Moneytree says that the new feature will save users hours in preparation time and even help them get more money back by making it easier to visualize their overall spending.

“Expenses will be the anchor for our paid tier,” Paul Chapman, Moneytree’s CEO, tells Tech in Asia, hinting that more premium features are in the pipeline. “We’re always looking at cool new ways to wow our guests and make their lives more enjoyable. The first order of business is to take in feedback on expenses and chart a course from there.”

In addition to expenses, version 1.7 brings updated notifications. Users can set notifications for when their salary disburses, when their credit card payment is due, when loyalty card points are set to expire, when a large transaction is attempted, and when an account balance falls beneath a chosen threshold. Notifications can appear as alerts or be sent as emails.

Moneytree has seen more than 600,000 installs since launching in April 2013, and has aggregated roughly 80 million transactions. The app, available for iPhone and iPad, connects with over 1,300 financial institutions in Japan, equivalent to 99 percent coverage of the entire Japanese banking and credit card market.

With nearly full-coverage in Japan and a growing user base, scaling out to new markets is on Moneytree’s horizon – but the startup isn’t rushing to do so.

“We see ourselves as an international Japanese company,” says Chapman. “We’ve got 15 members from around the world – including Japan, of course – and advisors from global companies like PayPal, MasterCard, and Mitsui Sumitomo. But to be an international company, you need to leave Japan. You can go global on very little resources, but we want to make sure that we do it right.”

Moneytree has attracted US$1.6 million in seed funding from DG Incubation and angels. When asked about a future series A round, Chapman declined to share specifics.

“Startups are always fundraising, or they’re profitable,” he explains. “We just started monetizing today, so you know which camp we are in.”

See: iMoney raises $4M, aims to hit 5 million visitors per month by next year