Help your finances in todays Appy Monday!

We live in a fast pace world. This fast pace means that it is very easy to forget to balance our check book, or at least forget a charge here or there. Forgetting those charges can wreak havoc on your bank account and finances (sometimes for months). I hate when I forget a charge for $3 or $4 and I end up going negative at the bank…that one $3 or $4 error can make you bounce checks or have over draft charges…. It is easy to have a bad day and end up paying your bank an extra $35 – $70 in fees…sometimes more. I want to share a couple of apps with you that will hopefully help you out.

iSpending

Features:
- Add income/expense transactions under different category
- Add customize spending category name
- Add transactions quickly
- Instant summary for today/week/month/year
- Passcode lock
- Export through email
- View history records and compare them
- Graph report for 1, 3 or 6 months time period
- Separate graph report for income or expense alone
- Search for transaction by name, amount, note or any of them
- Polished UI, easy to use

iSpending is easy to use. As you can see in the above picture iSpending has two buttons on the front page, one for Add income, and one for add expense. When you hit the “add income” button, you are taken to a screen where you can put in the amount of the income, what the name of the income is, then you can decide what category that income belongs in (general income, Salary, Investment, Gift, or Business) You also can input what day the income came in and there is a note area so you can add a note to it. Once you are done and hit save it takes you back to the main screen where now you will see your income total.

Now you can add your expenses. The areas are the same to fill out, except the category area has changed to reflect expenses. (So now in the category area you have the choices of General Expense, Bills, Clothes, Food,Entertainment, Personal, Transportation, Education, Home, Medical and Insurance) Everytime you add an expense, it takes you back to the main screen and you will see that it has subtracted the Expense from the Income and it gives you what you have left as Savings.

iSavings not only keeps track of what your income is and what your expenses are, it also gives you a pie chart showing you were you are spending all your money. You can look up 1 month, 3 months, 6 months or a year of expense tracking. That way if you find that you don’t have enough money to pay your bills – you can see exactly where you can “trim the fat” out of your finances.

This app is free, for a version with a few ads…If you absolutely hate ads you can buy a version called iSpending Pro for $2.99 and it will have no ads.

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Checkbook HD Free

Summary:

- great special iPad/iPhone oriented interface design (luxurious library room)

- Direct Connect

- OFX import or manual input of data for your accounts

- detailed entries (income and expenses, regular and recurring transactions, reconcile, etc.)

- a lot of options for customization

- easy export to HTML and CSV (Excel)

- PIN code available (for privacy protection)

Check Book HD Free has a very nice looking interface. Checkbook HD Free is like iSpending, except for a few differences. The first thing I notice is you can have multiple accounts on it. The main screen shows you each of your accounts separate AND it shows you the balance of all your accounts. I only have one account, but I know some people will have more than one. Some families have one for the husband, one for the wife and one joint, this might be the app for them! Also you can keep track of credit cards or paypal. Check Book HD Free is an all in one finance tracker. It also sets up the expenses to look more like a checkbook, which I like.

Check Book HD Free is the free version of this app (obviously by the word FREE…right?) There is a paid version, where you will have no ads and it costs $1.99.

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Both of these apps are great for keeping digital track of your expenses. I am a pen and paper record keeper, but I think I will start using Check Book HD Free as a back up record, plus I can take it with me when we go out. There has been many times I have been out and about and trying to keep in my brain how much is in the bank account and how much we are spending. This will make it easier.

Both these apps, iSpending and Check Book HD FREE, can be a great tool to help you keep your finances straight and see where you spend the most. But you have to actually imput the information. The thing I like about these apps are that you can add the expenses in as you go, instead of trying to hold on to a bunch of receipts all day and then you get home and forget to enter one because it was in a bag.

 

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