Ace Budget
by CI Staff
Track your daily expenses on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.
Ace Budget is a financial app to help you track your daily expenses and income. You can create daily, weekly, monthly, semi-monthly and yearly budgets for an unlimited number of categories. You can also schedule transactions, create recurring transactions, view historical data, export data and more.
Tracking Expenses and Income
You can use Ace Budget in one of two ways—to simply track your expenses or to track both your cash inflows and outflows. In either case, the app allows you to create budget categories for your different spending items. As you spend money, you enter the amounts spent in each respective budge category. You can also set up alerts that indicate when you hit a pre-determined amount in an individual category. This helps you stay within set spending limits for your individual budget categories.
Using the app’s Advanced Budget Mode, you can track both income and expense items to get a complete picture of your finances. Again, you can create categories for both income and expenses.
When setting up individual budget items you can specify the cycle—daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, and so on. This is the period over which the app tracks your income and expenses for reporting purposes. At the end of a budget cycle, the app moves your current transactions to an archived list, which you can still view and edit even after transactions have been archived. In addition, you can opt for Ace Budget to “roll over” any remaining funds you allocated to a budget category for a cycle. For example, if you allocated $200 for eating out for the month and have $50 left over at the end of the cycle, the rollover option would add $50 to the eating out budget item the next month.
With Ace Budget you can set up recurring transactions for a budget as well as set reminders for scheduled transactions so you are aware of pending expenses due.
Once you have set up a budget and entered transactions, you can make changes to a budget or transaction. This includes deleting an individual transaction or an entire budget.
To help you visualize your spending habits, Ace Budget provides charts and reports that illustrate your monthly income and expenses. You can view expenses versus income, as well as expenses and income by budget.
Overall
Ace Budget is a handy app for those wanting to get a better handle on their spending. Like most other personal finance applications, you only get from it what you put into it. In order to get the most from this app, you will need to spend some time setting it up—creating budget items, inputting recurring expenses and income, etc. Our biggest complaint with the app is that it isn’t optimized for the iPad, meaning there is a lot of wasted screen space. Overall, however, Ace Budget is worth a look. If you are turned off by the $1.99 price tag, there is a Lite version available for free.
Ace Budget for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
SVT Software
Price: $1.99