After years of resisting a most obvious need, we have finally decided to start thinking seriously about setting our financial plan, and you know, try to figure out where my budget goes. Of course there are no shortages of options out there for doing this, whether you use a simple pocket laptop, or lead a personal accountant around with you all day, or try to find a suitable application for this on the Apple iPhone. We have been searching for the latter for some time now and just stumbled across what we feel are two pretty decent offerings among the many.

Expenditure

Expenditure, produced by mobile platform app developers Shape, is a simple no frills expense tracker which has some handy features. We have figured it out that if we’re going to budget ourselves, then it would be better if we keep track of everything, every little our expenditure; we have our mobile phone with us all the time so it’s the perfect place to do it. Open up Expenditure and you’re ready to enter how much your checking account just bled in the blink of an eye. Doing it immediately is a great habit to fall into, plus you could potentially cut down on all those receipts you always carry around.

There’s a built in guide that is kind of on the lite side, but the application is really incredibly easy to figure out, you probably won’t even need it. As do many budget applications, Expenditure works with multiple currencies, but unlike its competitor in this review, doesn’t offer currency conversion. You can create any number of tags for your expense/income entries which, of course, can help you to find out exactly where your money goes each day, and you can attach an image and/or notes to your entries. The images are a nice touch for when you need to remind yourself exactly why you’re going to be eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on cheap white bread for the next four weeks; there’s nothing like buyer’s remorse to kill an appetite. Although there’s no immediately obvious way to track multiple accounts in Expenditure, you can set up Groups which would serve just as well distinguishing between your main checking account and your savings, or even to keep track how much that first date is costing you, although we’re not sure how much that would impress your date, whipping out your Apple iPhone to input those bills at every turn. But then, hey, if you don’t want a second date then that may be the way to go, who knows?

One thing we really like about Expenditure is the opening screen. When the application opens you see the balance of your main account, or group, and a listing of sortable entries. You can switch between seeing your expenses as most recent, or the categories (tags) in which you’re spending the most. It’s not pretty or anything but it’s quick and easy to use and basically all you need to keep track of your cash flow.

CashTrails

For comparison we’ve also been playing around with CashTrails – Income and Expense Tracker by developer Vasyl Smyrnov. Both of these applications are very similar and mostly have the same functionality, but there are a few differences worth mentioning. CashTrails also deals with multiple currencies, but as mentioned earlier, this application also keeps you up-to-date on current exchange rates. CashTrails let’s you track your budget with six different accounts such as savings, checking, two different credit cards, and cash. It would appear as this default number of accounts is all you can have; it would be nice if CashTtrails utilized user made groups as Expenditures does, but these categories will probably serve most people just fine.

Entries are made quickly and painlessly just as in Expenditures, although CashTrails has no option for attaching pics to the entries. This is a minor thing though, in our opinion, as we really prefer the way CashTrails presents your budget breakdown. You can bring up reports of incomes and expenses in almost any time frame you need, from one day to the past year, and the app gives you multiple options as to how you want to see your information using either a standard timeline format, or a nice bar graph breakdown and more. CashTrails tagging function seems to be much more useful than that of Expenditures, but we might chalk that up to personal preference. We just get feel that we get a better, more thorough sense of our cash flow with CashTrails and in trying both of these applications out, we have found ourselves leaning more and more heavily on it.

Both applications are great and could definitely help you get a handle on your daily finances. In the end it might just come down to price. Expenditures is $1,99 at the Apple App Store, while CashTrails is a hefty $4.99. Is the difference in price worth it? We think so, yes, although we can’t exactly put my finger on what CashTrails offers over Expenditures to warrent paying a few more dollars; we believe it’s just in the presentation of the data, and CashTrails simply gives us the impression of having more information at my fingertips.