SplashMoney - Personal Finance Manager
By SplashData
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Description
Manage your money anytime, anywhere. Connect to your online bank from your iPhone and download transactions directly into SplashMoney. Create budgets and then track and analyze your spending with customizable reports and charts. Sync wirelessly with your PC or Mac to stay on top of your finances whether you're at home, on the road, or in the office.
SplashMoney Key Features:
- Connect wirelessly to many online US bank accounts (a unique benefit of SplashMoney compared to other finance applications on iPhone)
- Track different account types: checking, savings, credit card, cash, asset, liability, money market and line of credit
- Secure password protection using strong 256-bit Blowfish encryption
- Quickly enter data using memorized transactions
- Schedule transactions with reminders
- Budgets and charts
- Multiple currency support with live currency updates
- Simple, intuitive interface
- Sync over WiFi with your PC or Mac (see details below)
SplashMoney supports US banks offering Direct Connect online service (as Quicken and Microsoft Money use), which may require activation through your bank. For a list of supported banks, go to http://splashdata.com/splashmoney/banks.htm
Note: Wireless sync option requires SplashMoney iPhone Desktop software, sold separately, available for download at splashdata.com/iphone with a complete 30 day free trial. SplashMoney iPhone Desktop is a free upgrade for all existing SplashMoney users.
What's New in Version 4.7.2
Changed to a new, more reliable currency server
Customer Reviews
Is This The Best We Can Do?
My bank was covered in the list, so I can't gripe on the "compatible" banks. What I can do, though, is tell you that this app gets about halfway there when it comes to a good/simple personal finance app on the iPhone. First of all, expect crashes, and a lot of them. I had no less than five when setting up my accounts. I'm not sure who to blame there, since Apple's 2.0 software update has been less than stellar so far. Don't let me forget to mention the mandatory five-second splash screen before you even get access to the app. Second, decimal places are disabled by default, causing an $8.51 transaction to show up as $9. Enabling decimal places gives you $23.7 amounts for a $23.70 transaction. Stupid, right? Lastly, the pie chart gives you a "100% Uncategorized" by default, since you have to manually assign categories to every transaction. I don't have that kind of time, and there are apps and services that do that automatically based on the payee's name. This apps needs work!
Apple, how can you allow your loyal customers to be ripped off like this!
I don't understand how an app like this can be put up for sale in the app store. We have no way of running a trial on any of these programs before we buy, so we have to trust you, Apple, to look out for us and make sure bad software doesn't make its way on here. You have really let us down with this app. It crashes constantly, it absolutely does not do what it says it will do, it is pretty much useless. And now I am out $10. What a rip! I am going to try to get my money back. This is unacceptable.
Crippling flaws galore
Because this app is of little use without a desktop app to sync with, this review also includes the SplashMoney desktop app that's supposed to sync with the iPhone.
Problems:
There's no choice or indication of where the data are being saved. Users need to know where private information is being stored on their systems, period. Where is SplashMoney putting this info? It's a complete mystery.
Moving (or backing up) your data requires annoying export to QIF format, one account at a time. This means you lose future scheduled transactions entirely, and transfers are no longer classified as transfers. You can't even move data between different installations of SplashMoney itself. If you switch OSs, get a new computer, or install a new version of the OS on a different partition, you face this multi-account export/import rigamarole and lose the aforementioned data and the payees you entered.
The default transaction type is a check, with a check number that's assigned by default. Not only are checks unlikely to be most people's most-common transaction anymore, but the default transaction type should be the last type used. Not so in SplashMoney, so just about every time you enter a transaction, you have to fuss with the transaction type.
There's no "transfer" transaction type. Instead, there's an obscure and clumsy workaround: The account names are included in the Category list (not the Payee list, where they'd make sense); you have to open up the source account and create a withdrawal, setting the destination account as the "category". Again, why not the payee? Ludicrous. But wait, below the account list there's cryptic dual-arrow button with no ToolTip. You might think that this would kick off a sync, but in fact it seems to create a transfer. Why is this down here, separated from the other transaction types and undocumented?
The documentation doesn't address the SplashMoney desktop app at all; it discusses everything in terms of the handheld UI.
Switching between accounts causes you to lose your place in the transaction list (Mac version). If you're at the bottom of your Checking transactions and you need to refer to something in Savings, for example, you'll return to Checking to find it scrolled nearly to the top, every time. I was working in 2008 and suddenly found myself looking at transactions from five years earlier, never having touched the scrollbar.
There's a checkbox next to each transaction, but there's no way to tell the app what status to give the transaction when you click on the checkbox. A transaction can be cleared or reconciled, but checking the box means always means "cleared" and there's no way to change that. So marking something as reconciled requires you to open up the transaction-detail dialog, and then open a list of statuses and pick "reconciled." This is one of the reasons I wanted to abandon Money, but even Money only makes you dig through one context menu. When you're reconciling the bank's statement with your own records, you just want to go through the lists and check each transaction off with minimal hassle. Digging through menus over and over again for every transaction? NO!
The app doesn't associate a payee or source name with a transaction type, so you always have to mess with it. "Payee" should not be the first field in the transaction dialog; "transaction type" should be. The first thing you want to do when creating a transaction is say what kind of transaction it is. If it's a deposit, the payee is YOU, so the Payee field would more logically change to Payer. Then, if you entered the name of your employer, the category could default to Wages & Salary. All you'd have to do is type the first few characters of your employer's name, enter the date and amount, and be done. This is what happens in Money. In SplashMoney, you have to dig through the category list every time. Same thing goes for withdrawals: The vast majority of my purchases at Costco are gas, so if I enter "Costco" as the payee in Money, the category automatically defaults to "Auto: gas". In SplashMoney, I have to pick that manually, over and over.
Some amounts (scheduled transactions, specifically) have "Rs" as the currency, even when they're entered in U.S. dollars. This apparently stands for rupees, and is a known bug that was supposed to have been fixed in version 4.03. However, the problem still appears in version 4.03.
The desktop app was updated to 4.03 and is available at SplashData's site. The iPhone app was also supposedly updated a month ago with critical (as in crash-resolving) fixes, but the App Store is still listing 4.02 as the latest version.
It must be harder than one would think to write a glorified transaction register, because SplashData fails here. Microsoft Money is cumbersome at times and doesn't sync with your iPhone, but it looks refined and ingenious next to SplashMoney.
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- Category: Finance
- Updated Dec 10, 2009
- Current Version: 4.7.2
- 4.7.2 (iPhone OS 3.0 Tested)
- 1.4 MB
- Languages: English
- Seller: SplashData
- © 2008 SplashData, Inc
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone and iPod touch. Requires iPhone OS 2.2.1 or later.
