Your spending allowance, and that's it.

I hate budgeting. Compartmentalising my spending into arbitrary, inflexible ring-fences I can't possibly stick to has never seemed to work, for some reason. Luckily, someone's come up with a budgeting app that doesn't actually require much budgeting.

Level Money is a new money management app for iOS and Android that tells you simply what you can spend each day. And that's all. You don't have to predict how much you'll spend on food, you don't get stuck deciding which bill to ignore because you needed a new winter jacket. All you need to do is to watch what you spend for the day.

It's beautifully simple and perfect for someone like me who isn't organized enough to do a weekly food shop. It's the app I've been waiting for since I moved to Manhattan with it's eye watering rents. In fact, I was working on something similar myself when Level was released, and I was delighted to see they got it right!

Signing up to Level is pretty straightforward, you create an account, and then provide details of your online banking and credit card accounts so that the service can track your spending. Then the clever part, Level takes a guess at which of your outgoings are regular bills. In my case this was pretty accurate, although a couple of restaurants that I frequent ended up being marked as monthly expenses. This informed an immediate lifestyle change: I looked for different eateries.

Once Level has determined your bills, you set your expected income and decide how much (if any) you would like to save per month. Then you're done. You get your spending limits for today, this week and this month, and as the day goes on, Level updates with any new transactions it finds.

The Level team have been working to make the updates as frequent as possible, but in some cases it isn't quite perfect. My Capital One credit account, for example, will not post pending transactions to Level, so things take a day or two to appear in my Activity list. Chase and American Express transactions, on the other hand, are pretty darn quick to appear.

Level relies heavily on being able to get data directly from your bank, so it's pretty much US-centric right now. The list of supported banks in the US is pretty long, though, and apparently there are means for them to get the outlying small banks on board on request.

UPDATE: After a few friends tried to download, it seems Level Money is US only, which makes sense given their relationship with US banks.

A great touch is the savings feature. You specify an amount you want to save each month, and Level will take this into account when determining your daily budget. If you underspend, excess money will be added to your savings. If you overspend, it will be deducted from your amount saved. This is a great way to visualise exactly how much better off you are when you spend carefully. The other day I even got a notification congratulating me for only spending 50% of my budget for the week.

So all in all, Level is a great tool for the busy and ill-disciplined among us, sure to make even the most scatterbrained better off. The best part? It's free.