Canstar: Compare and Save

I just moved to Australia and I didn’t know the companies here and so I used this to find the best deals on my home insurance, car insurance and electricity plan and I haven’t moved my phone plan but I have a better mobile plan as well. I have definitely saved hours of time researching and for sure have saved money.

I appreciate that this app is quite useful for pulling all my accounts into one space, however the whole point of having all my accounts together is to see where all my money is going over a period of time - particularly a pay period. This app does not allow you to view past spending patterns over a specific period. If you select “my cycle” i.e your specified pay period, it only lets you start it within the last 6 days. If your pay period is a fortnight, it will display the future fortnight worth of spending, which funnily enough for most is $0. Even if you select a “monthly” period to display, it only lets you display from the start of the month, so if it happens to be the first week of the month, you can only actually see a few days worth of spending. I can’t comprehend why they would have designed it this way. Most of the widgets on the dashboard are basically useless because of this. I can see other people have raised this issue over a year ago and they’ve made no steps to correct it. Very disappointing.

I’m impressed with the functionality of this app and it is far superior to that offered by my bank. A useful inclusion would be to have more flexibility around the budgeting period; for example I am paid monthly but the payment date can be anywhere between the 16th and 21st of the month meaning that some periods have two pays, and some zero. Similarly, a bi-monthly option for bills would be good (i.e. Water Corporation bills in Western Australia).