Looking to get your financial house in order? To quote the commercials,“There’s an app for that.” A check of the Apple App Store shows that there are actually quite a few iPhone applications for that!
On the desktop, Quicken is the king of personal and small business bookkeeping and it only makes sense that they would also have an application called Quicken Online Mobile that helps you keep track of your spending and receipts while out on the road, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
A new application, just out, that takes Quicken’s functionality to another level is Shoeboxed. The name plays on the most common receipt storage system out for decades. Shoeboxed allows you to take a picture of your receipt and its recognition software files it away, so you don’t even have to type the entry!
There’s also Dough, which is the three-in-one personal finance application for managing bank accounts, bills, budgeting & reporting all from your iPhone.
iXpenseIt is rated as the number one finance application and claims to simplify expense tracking and budgeting. Its photo recognition technology is not quite as sophisticated as Shoeboxed, but it does allow you to keep a photo record of your personal and business receipts. The cost for this application is $4.99, but you can try a free version called iXpenseIt Lite.
I bought iXpenseIt. It quickly became so depressing when I saw how much money I didn’t have that I stopped using it the first day and stuck to more fun applications like Facebook, Twitterific and iBowl!
For those of you who still have money left to invest in the stock market, NASDAQ has its Portfolio Manager application for keeping track of your investments.
Bottom line, these are all potentially great tools but will do little good if you don’t use them. Unfortunately, there is no application for financial discipline; I would have bought it! —stanley yorker
