Managing money doesn’t have to be scary and confusing. With Starling it can be intuitive and interactive. In the second part of our Starling app series, we tell you about the features of Starling that can help you create a budget, keep up with spending and start saving.

Budget building: Homescreen

The Pulse on the home screen tells you exactly how much you have spent each day and on what. If you work to a predefined budget, it’s a great way to tell at a glance how you are doing. And if you don’t have one, it can help you set one.

Total honesty: Spending Insights and personalised categories

Before Starling, working out how much I should budget for food or travel would have taken hours. As a result, I never created a budget. But with Spending Insights, my income and outgoings are all in one place and I can see what I’ve spent at Sainsbury’s or on Ubers in a glance.

You can also change the categories so that they work for you. For example, if your recent M&S purchase was a new pair of shoes, not dinner for two, you can change the category from Groceries to Shopping. You can also select whether you’d like all future purchases to be categorised in the same way.

Stay on schedule: Edit standing orders

Standing orders, such as your rent or a regular payment made to a family member, are payments you’ve set up yourself from the app. Direct debits, such as a magazine subscription or your phone bill, are payments that have been set up by a company on your behalf.

Both standing orders and direct debits can be cancelled from the app. Standing orders can also be edited. If your rent goes up, you won’t have to set up a completely new standing order, you can just edit the amount in the app. It’s worth noting that when you cancel a direct debit from the app, this will stop money being transferred but you may still have to speak to the company to cancel a subscription fully and clear outstanding payments.

Effortless saving: Goals and rounding up your spending

If you can, try to build savings into your budget so that you start building up a reserve of money for a rainy day or for a specific goal.

Our Goals feature enables you to set money aside from your main balance. You won’t be able to spend it unless you move it back and you’ll be able to set yourself a target and check on how much you’ve saved so far in the app. You can also set up a regular payment to a Goal in your Starling app so that it’s automatically set aside each day, week or month.

The other way to automate savings with Starling is by switching on our round ups feature for a particular Goal. This will mean that if you spend £2.40 on your commute, the amount will be rounded up and 60p will be put into a Goal of your choice. You can also multiply your Round Ups by two, five or ten. If you switched your round up to ten, it would only take you 17 journeys costing £2.40 for you to set aside £100. Starling puts your savings on auto-pilot.

In the third and final part of this series, we’ll look at what makes Starling the best bank for travelling.