About a year ago, I put together a list of handy iPhone apps for managing your money. In the time since then, the app market has grown dramatically, and I’ve discovered many more uses for my iPhone. Thus, I thought I’d put together another rundown of money and finance apps that I have on my iPhone.
- Bank of America – This is where we have our “local” bank accounts. I use the app to transfer money, pay bills, etc. Hopefully they’ll add remote deposit sometime soon.
- ING Direct – Provides an overview of account balances and activity, ability to transfer money, and access to their bill pay functionality. Here again, I’d love remote deposit.
- Vanguard – This is where we do most of our investing, and their app allows you to check in on your account and complete mutual fund transactions.
- Fidelity Investments – Provides access to consumer and NetBenefits accounts, which is handy for an employer-related retirement account that I have at Fidelity.
- American Express – I use this to check in on our Amex Blue Cash and Amex Platinum SkyMiles accounts.
- Citi Mobile – I use this to check in on our Citi Platinum Select account.
- Chase Mobile – I use this to check in on our Chase Freedom card, but if you have a bank account with Chase, you can use this app to deposit checks remotely.
- PayPal – Exactly what it sounds like… A portable PayPal client. I don’t use this one very frequently, but it’s nice to have on hand.
- CardStar – This handy little app stores your the numbers from your grocery store affinity cards, reward cards, and membership cards. It even generates a scannable barcode so you can whip out your iPhone instead of fishing through a stack of cards.
- Amazon Mobile – I frequently use this app when out shopping to check Amazon’s pricing as well as user reviews on whatever I happen to be looking at. More recently, I’ve also been using it to place orders instead of firing up my computer.
- SnapTell – Very slick app that lets you scan the front of books, CDs, DVDs, or video games to access online pricing, reviews, etc. More recently, they’ve also added barcode scanning.
- Kayak Flight & Hotel Search – I use this to keep tabs on the price of airline tickets. If you like Kayak.com, then you’ll love this app.
- Evernote – This is the iPhone client for the Evernote document-storage service. I use it for storing scanned images of receipts, keeping notes on tax-related transactions, etc.
- JotNot Scanner Pro – This app turns your iPhone into a scanner so you can snap pictures of checks, receipts, etc. Crop them, square them up, and convert to pdf before storing in Evernote (above) or e-mailing them to yourself from within the app.
- SplashID – This one is a little pricey by App Store standards ($9.99), but it’s totally worth it in my book. It’s an encrypted login/password/info keeper that syncs over wifi with an optional desktop client.
What others think…
With so many apps out there, I’ve only scratched the surface. I thus decided to ask my Twitter followers for recommendations of their own. Here are fourteen more that they came up with:
- Mint.com
- Discover Mobile
- DebtTracker Pro
- Save Benjis
- Ace Budget (Lite)
- PocketMoney (Lite)
- QuickTip Tip Calculator
- Square
- Barcode Scanner
- Shop Savvy
- Morningstar
- Yahoo Finance
- CNN/Money
- CNBC Real-Time
If you have any other suggestions, please share them in the comments.
My fiancé and I mainly use two finance apps to keep track of our money: iBank, and HomeBudget.
We share finances, and HomeBudget has been perfect because it uses cloud sync. So no matter where we are, our phones are always in sync and we can always see how much money is available for spending. We essentially use it like an envelope system. We made accounts like Food, Transportation, and Entertainment. Then we put amounts into those accounts based on what we want to do that week.
iBank is where we track all of our actual accounts. It has a desktop app for Mac, and will sync with multiple users over a shared wifi connection if you have the desktop app open. It’s really quick and easy to use – especially at the checkout. I wish it would also cloud sync, but it at least forces us to sit together and reconcile the accounts.
For YNAB users they just came out with iPhone app. And they are considering making an Android version as well.
USAA has a great iphone app. I think an android app is coming out also. It lets you manage your accounts, submit insurance claims, deposit checks over the iphone and now you can look for cars or homes through the app as well.
for Android phones I like mint.com. The all have their drawbacks, but mint has done a great job on the mobile interface. Clear, easy to navigate from macro to micro transaction level. I am do not use it to track bills, but for balance and budget across multiple accounts it’s great. The latest feature includes real estate and other assets such as cars, boats etc.
I use Pageonce, PocketMoney, Bill Pal and Debt snowball. Couldn’t do without PageOnce. Best all around Account tracker. Saved me a few times with my bank balances.
I just got my iPhone this week so I’ve been playing around with a few of these already.
In terms of barcode scanning apps, I found many of them to be very finicky; especially ShopSaavy, which I had a lot of trouble in terms of getting things to scan properly. I downloaded RedLaser instead, which was more versatile and wasn’t quite as picky about how long the cam had to be held still before you scanned, etc.
SHOEBOXED!!! My #1 app of all my apps is Shoeboxed. It’s an absolute must-have if you own your own business.
I also love Morningstar because you can monitor all your investments without your passwords or security concerns of actually using your broker’s app.
Pageonce Bills is a neat program for keeping track of bills due, sort of like mint without the balance info. I like it because it has a calendar view of your bills.
I just downloaded iVelopesLite a few weeks ago to keep track of our entertainment and allowance budgets “on the run” – it has way more functionality than I need, but it was free!
That’s correct it’s a new feature.
Ahhh… So you keep the data in DropBox? Slick. I don’t think it used to have that functionality, did it?
Dropbox sync to all devices. In my case I’m a mac shop so my ipad, ipod touch, mac. Though I have a droid phone (which it supports) and now Windows app!
Investor Junkie: Curious as to what 1Password does better. I mainly like SplashID b/c I was already using it on my Palm Centro (before I had an iPhone) and I thus already had all of my data in it.
IMHO 1Password is better than SplashID