What to Look For In An iPhone Financial App

When deciding which iPhone financial app would serve your needs best, it helps to first determine what you want to accomplish. There are numerous programs with distinct purposes available. We call the first group of programs personal money manager. Many people need a program that will allow them to track expenses and income quickly and easily. In a sense, these programs replace the paper checkbook or a pocketful of sticky notes to track the comings and goings of money throughout the day. A program like this should let you know where you stand financially at any given moment and give you the big picture of where all the money went. Some of these programs are specifically designed to help you stick to a budget and let you see how you’re doing relative to limits you’ve set.

A group of iPhone apps that can work hand-in-hand with the personal money manager are the online banking applications. If your bank sponsors one of these apps, you can easily and securely check balances, pay bills and transfer money right from your iPhone. Many of these apps also help you locate your bank’s nearest branch or ATM using the GPS functionality.

Stock market apps allow you to follow markets generally or selected stocks in your portfolio. Many also provide up-to-the-minute financial news. For news and quotes to be shown in realtime it’s generally necessary to have a WiFi connection. A final simple but common financial app is the tip calculator. The best of these programs make it a snap to decide how much to tip and how to divide the bill among friends and colleagues.

Features:
The main thing to keep in mind when choosing a personal money manager program is its ease-of-use and how well it helps you track what is important to you. Forgetting that simple principle can result in you working to serve a program rather than it being helpful to you. Among the handiest features of financial apps is that many of them offer a free version. Most of the free versions are abbreviations of the full programs and are designed to allow you to try the app before buying it. Take advantage of the free programs and when you find the one that best meets your needs, consider buying the complete program. Most of the full versions are still inexpensive—many under a dollar. If you’re looking for a stock market app, be certain that it accesses the markets that are of interest to you and that it deals with currencies that matter.

Interface:
As with other apps, the interface is critical in making it a useable tool and not a source of frustration. Number keypads should be large and easy to use. You should be able to input information quickly and resulting information needs to be useful and easily viewable.

Graphics:
iPhone financial apps can be pretty boring but among the most valuable. Don’t expect displays to be exciting, but they should be easy to read and understand.

Stability:
Does the app work reliably? If it doesn’t, you’ll be back to pencil and paper in no time. If you can’t count on it to give you the information you need when you need it, try another. This is a great time to take advantage of the free trials.

Program Size:
Most of the apps in this category are small, ranging from 0.1MB to 0.5MB, so they shouldn’t present a memory problem.

On this site, you will find objective reviews of iPhone or iPod touch apps with rankings of key elements to help you sift through the enormous number of options available and choose those that best meet your needs.