Spend - Budgeting review

Mark Mackay

We review Spend – Budgeting, an iPhone that helps you manage your finances and avoid hitting the red

Published on Sep 15, 2009

Apple outsourcing app creation to anyone that wanted to have a go at it has ensured that apps are appearing for every imaginable task.

One of the more popular application types that have emerged in the past couple of years are those of a financial nature. Spend - Budgeting is one such an app. It aims to help you budget your finances so you can avoid going overdrawn and being a victim of a £30 charge for accidentally taking 23p of your bank's countless billions.

The interface is clearly designed and easy to use, a quality that the developer touts a lot both on the website and in the app store. Organising finances can be confusing at the best of the times and the simple interface helps keep things manageable. You can add as many budgets as you like to the app allowing you to keep separate ones for things such as petrol or food expenses.

Once you've set up your budgets you can set the amount of the money they should be and you're good to go. Spend - Budgeting will let you set up recurring charges to any particular budget so if you're making one that represents your bank account you can input all direct debits for matters such as rent.

Other transactions have to be added in manually and each can be labelled so you can see what's what at a glance. The app also lets you transfer amounts of money between budgets which will help if you're juggling several or need to save in one in order to boost in another.

In the options screen, you can set a PIN number to keep your finances from prying eyes and there's links to some web pages such as an FAQ and a support forum. You can also export your data in a CSV file to an email of your choosing without leaving the app. This lets you view or work with your budgeting data in spreadsheet format on a desktop computer.

There are a couple of small niggles with the app such as the fact that it doesn’t let you change the currency. All fields are shown in dollars which doesn’t make it unusable but it would have been easy to add in a couple of other major currencies such as the British pound. Aside from this though, Spend - Budgeting is worth a glance if you're looking for an app to help you manage your finances.