Budgeting apps
By Aaron Broverman • Bankrate.com

Budget
Australian developer Deskescape offers an app that's all about simplicity -- starting with its name. Budget offers some of the same features as TextHog, including the ability to export your expenses to an Excel spreadsheet, customize your categories and see your expense categories in a variety of different graphs. However, Budget is probably more useful to the technophobes who find themselves with iPhones.

"(Budget) comes down to ease of use while providing all the flexibility and features a person could need," says software developer Travis Bagley.

It's easy to use because the app gives you a choice of categories at start up, and you can enter your total for each simply by tapping the total column opposite the category name. You set the categories by tapping the budget icon at the bottom of the screen, or you can tap the advanced icon for other options, like setting an item to recur for three months before you have to re-enter it.

Bagley's goal is to make sure budgeting takes as little time as possible, recognizing that there needs to be a little bit of financial breathing room in every month. "Recording every transaction in your life can become tiresome. You need to compromise between complete accuracy and taking some assumptions on your spending habits," he says.

Bagley says he has helped many financially irresponsible individuals with features like graphs that compare expenses with income on a yearly or monthly basis, the ability to highlight the categories that become over-budget and reminders for expenses that have fallen overdue. "We've assisted people who might not have normally downloaded a traditional PC budgeting app realize where they are spending their money and what areas of their finances they need to improve."

Budget is available from the iTunes App Store for 99 cents for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

BudgetCare
Developed by Suponix, a web design and video production company in Odessa, Ukraine, BudgetCare doesn't get a lot of attention in North America, but across the pond, it is one of the most popular iPhone budgeting apps. "We really don't know the exact answer why," says project manager Andrew Grabovsky. "I remember the time when there was a huge sales boost in U.K., which lasted for about a month, but we didn't find a particular reason for this."

Maybe BudgetCare's clear and easy interface is the culprit. On the horizontal, you see daily, weekly, monthly and yearly views, while lined up vertically are four categories: New Transaction, Statistics, Budget and Balance, as well as Settings. Just enter your new transaction, select your category and the application does the rest. When you juxtapose your monthly budget total against how much you spend, a steadily increasing meter fills until it reaches your budget number.

Like the other apps, you get the versatility of adding custom categories and every conceivable graph you may need. Recurring transactions aren't possible yet, but Grabovsky says that is their most requested feature, and they're working on adding it now.

The one glaring drawback for Suponix's effort is the price: $1.99 is expensive for a relatively basic app like this. Most comparable budgeting apps can be found for a buck or completely free. Normally, more expensive fees are required to offset file storage or other subscription services, but you won't see a price drop anytime soon.

"We charge for the app because it's a commercial product which has its value. We think that our price is also well-balanced and affordable for everybody," says Grabovsky.

Still, it's clear to everyone that budgeting on your phone is the future, or as TextHog's Darren Marshall puts it: "It's not just mobile budgeting that's the future -- it's mobile everything."

Aaron Broverman is a writer living in Toronto.