Spend, iPhone Budgeting App
Every since I started my monthly budgeting using YNAB, I have been looking for an easy way to keep track of my daily expenses. When making my day to day purchases I try to use my debit card rather than cash. For tracking purposes this approach works the best for me. However, there are times I use cash and receive receipts for my purchases. Somehow the receipt disappears somewhere between the cash register and entering the transaction into my budgeting software.
For those of you with Apple iPhones you may be aware that version 2.0 of the iPhone software was released today. As I searched through the iTunes application store, I found a couple budgeting programs. One cost $4.99 and one cost $1.99 at the time of writing this. Since they are both new, there weren’t any reviews for me to go over prior to making my decision. I decided to purchase both and come to my own conclusion in hopes of helping someone else looking for a mobile budgeting solution. After using both of them for several hours, I decided I am going to use Spend.
When opening Spend the main screen list your “Budgets”. I chose to go ahead and add all the categories I keep track of in YNAB. So for instance I have a category called “Auto”, with several sub-categories. So my Budget page has the following listed one per line. Auto:Gas, Auto:Insurance, Auto:Registration and so on. All of these are created by hitting the “+” icon in the top right corner. While creating each item you can choose the frequency of the budget and the amount you are budgeting for the category. I set my frequency to monthly, and then set the amount I had set aside in YNAB for that category. Once a budget amount is set for a category that amount is shown underneath the category on the main screen.
At lunch today I headed to the mall and payed for my lunch in cash. As I sat down at a table to eat, I pulled out my iPhone. I started up the Spend iPhone Application and clicked on “Dining:Work Lunch”. I hit the “+” icon in the bottom left and entered the name of the restaurant I bought my food from along with the amount I spent. The application uses the time and date it is when entering the transaction. With the transaction now in my iPhone, I was able to throw the receipt away without worries. After exiting out of the transaction entering mode, I returned to the main budgeting screen. The “Dining:Work Lunch” category now has a number to the right of it, that tells me how much money I have available for “Work Lunches” for the rest of the month. The number is in orange if you are over half way to your budgeted amount. The amount will change to red if you are over budget or don’t have any money left for that budget category. It will be in green if there is no budget assigned for that category or nothing has been spent.
I did discover a bug while using the program and sent the developer an email. He replied very quickly and informed me the fix was in place and would be implemented in the next version. He gave me a workaround, which I was using, in the meantime. The developer is at Apple’s mercy a little, since after submitting a new version, he must wait for them to include it in their store. I am however very happy with his reply and look forward to providing feedback to him as I continue to use this application.
I highly recommend this program to anyone looking for a simple, easy to use, mobile budgeting application. If you setup and follow your budget this $1.99 will pay for itself many times over as you begin to see areas where you are wasting money and areas where you could be saving.
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Jul 13th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Jul 13th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Jul 15th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Jul 16th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Thanks
Jul 16th, 2008 at 9:27 am
When starting out with YNAB I purchased YNAB Pro. It does require Windows, so if you are running on a MAC this would not be the option for you. You can however try the basic version if this is an issue. I have not tried that version so I can’t help you with a review on it, but it looks to be the YNAB methods in Excel spreadsheet forum. I highly recommend the Pro software as it has really helped me get me spending under control. I will be creating a post in the future about my experience with this program but until then here a are a couple links that may help answer your questions.
Quick Start Guide
User Guide
Hope this helps!
Aug 17th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Keep up the good work!
Oct 27th, 2008 at 4:14 am
I was wondering if you tried uploading your expense from spend and importing them in YNAB Pro, I don’t know if YNAB allows that ?
It will be great, I’m currently bought and I’m using spend, my wife as well, but need to go further and want to use a budgeting tool.
The best things will be if both myself and my wife could export our daily, weekly expenses in YNAB and analyse them on the computer.
Thanks for your help,
Seb
Oct 28th, 2008 at 1:55 pm