It’s one thing to set a travel budget. Actually sticking to that budget when you’re busy bouncing between museums, landmarks, restaurants, hotels, and airports is entirely another!

Introducing Trail Wallet – an app designed for iOS users to keep track of their expenses on the road. It’s a dummy proof app anyone can get the hang of quickly, with a slick uncluttered interface and just about the right amount of functionality.

Trail Wallet was created by full-time travelers Simon Fairbairn and Erin McNeaney, who know all too well the pain of collecting receipts and running calculations. After all, worrying about money is the last thing anyone wants to do while traveling!

The first thing to do is create a trip and set a budget – either a daily amount or a limit for the whole trip. Then you’re all set to start recording.

Just hit the big plus button to enter a purchase in the local currency and it will calculate how much that adds up to in your home currency and display this as well.

The exchange rates are automatically updated whenever you’re online. You can use the app anytime though, and enter costs even if you don’t have an internet connection. It’s dead easy to input transactions on the go, or if you prefer, to batch them all at the end of the day.

You’ll start off with a few basic categories but you can easily create your own, or use the tags function to get even more granular. Amusingly, one of the default categories is Bribes!

There are 218 plus currencies available within Trail Wallet; you just need to select which ones to activate at any point in time. Once you’ve made your selection you can toggle between those currencies when entering a purchase. To save time here it pays not to have more currencies active than you need!

View your expenses by trip or by month to get a broader picture of how you’re going. There are running totals, bar graphs to show trends over time and pie charts to break down the categories. You can also export your data to a spreadsheet if you want to delve into it further.

Look out for the kooky in-app messages, alternately congratulatory or sympathetic depending on whether you’re tracking over or under budget – a nice touch!

Trail Wallet is free to download, so you can test it out with up to 25 recorded transactions. However, price hikes since I first downloaded the app mean Trail Wallet now costs $8.99 for unlimited use, so it may be overkill for shorter vacations. But for longer trips – especially spanning multiple countries and currencies – this app makes it a cinch to manage your budget on the go.