Money for iPhone Review

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Money for iPhone Review

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Money for iPhone Review

By Rob Rich on July 12th, 2011
Our Rating:

:: HANDY
iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad

Money for iPhone offers up a fairly comprehensive financial management toolset for a pittance. Just understand that it requires a bit of a time commitment for it to be most effective.

Developer: Jumsoft
Price: $1.99
Version: 2.0.1
App Reviewed on: iPhone 3GS
iPhone Integration Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
User Interface Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars
Re-use / Replay Value Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Overall Rating: 4.42 out of 5 stars

Finances. It seems like everyone has trouble keeping track of them these days. Bills, payments, paydays, rent and the occasional unforeseen expense can often be a bit of a pain to stay on top of. Luckily there’s no shortage of help to be found on the App Store. Now I don’t feel like I’ve messed around with enough of these financial apps to say that Money for iPhone is the best out there, but I can say that I found it helpful.

Money for iPhone is designed to help users keep track of their finances by allowing them to set their account balances, schedule payments (weekly, monthly, etc.) and so on. It takes a decent amount of work for the initial set up, but once everything is ready, it’s fairly smooth sailing. I’ll get to those details in a moment.

The actual act of setting up all of these factors was a little tough at first because, rather than looking up a how-to, I decided to wing it. After several retries, I finally figured out what everything did and meant and the rest was simple, but the whole thing was rather daunting at first. After knowing how to do stuff, setting up a payment or payday was as simple as scrolling through a small list, tapping on the correct field and filling in a few small blank spots. Money for iPhone took care of the rest.

As handy as it is, Money for iPhone does overlook a few small details. For one thing, it’s a little bothersome to have to manually enter in every expense each time it occurs (even if it is just opening the app and pushing a button). I mean, the app is already syncing with the calendar to schedule payments, so why can’t it automatically deduct them from an account’s balance? Another bigger issue is that it lacks a few specific categories, making it ideal for salaried workers who have the exact same expenses from month-to-month, but less useful to those with hourly wages and fluctuating paychecks and expenses. Sure these can all be entered in manually, but they’d have to be keyed in each and every time. Kind of a drag.

I think the trick is to think of Money for iPhone as more of a digital checkbook than a financial aid. And really, when viewed as such it can be quite a useful app to have. It won’t necessarily replace jumping online to double-check an account, and it certainly won’t make for a good alternative to online banking (because it doesn’t actually do that), but it will make a good stand-in for a pen and an awkwardly shaped booklet. Personally, I’d say it’s worth the two dollars and the two-and-a-half megabytes.