In an effort to be a better blogger, I have decided that I will be publishing stories, reviews, and other things I find interesting on this blog. As it transitions this coming year I hope that you will continue to read and offer constructive criticism. So with that written, on with the review.

Last week, I was informed of an app called Money Book: Finance with Flair. I was intrigued by the article on the app, and I decided I needed to investigate this further. As someone who believes a $0.99 app is always worth a try, I decided to pull the trigger.
*(Note to all those reading this, the app was on sale at the time, I think it is now back up to $2.99, but it could change.)

After downloading this app my first impressions were that the UI (User Interface), was incredibly well designed. I thought while using it that getting from screen to screen was seamless and exactly how Apple had envisioned an iPhone app to behave. Clearly, the user experience was well conceived while developing this application.

The application comes with standard budget elements. They allow you the ability to set up your gross monthly income, enter your recurring bills, track daily expenses, and see some well designed graphs of your expenses.

Here are some photos of the app so you can see exactly how the interface looks and works.

From this screen you are able to see your highest expenses and a fuel meter of where you are in your budget. It is easy to add a new expense from this screen.

This is a graphical view of where your money is going.

This is where you can see all of your recurring transactions. You can add a note on each one that will appear in your summary.

A nice feature is the ability to export your log. You can track and store multiple months on this view, but by having this log, you can send it as a CSV File.

This is the page where you enter an expense. I think it is well designed and allows you to select from about 20 icons, and it has the iPhone calculator feel.

My only complaints about this app would be the following.

1) They need to develop a way for you to update your recurring expenses so that you can set dates for those transactions. This would help for those that want to have a true date tracking budget. Currently your recurring payments are taken out on the first of each month, so that is a bit frustrating.
2) I would like to see some more default items add to new transactions page. They have about 20 right now, but they would be better served if you could choose from a few more.
3) They should develop a quick way to pull up a previous transaction again. I am a person that eats at Chipotle (A LOT). Each time I go my bill is $9.91 (I will let you guess what I get for that price), and it would be great if I could just have a quick add button. Instead I have to enter it as a new transaction and type a new note.

Overall, I would recommend this app. I am not sure what type of ratings scale I am going to use (most likely something with beards) but when I do come up with one, I will come back and rate this app more appropriately. For now, I feel this app is an 8 out of 10. I think it has room for improvement, but it is a very good iPhone budgeting app. My suggestion is, if you need a quick way to track your expenses each day and do not have a current solution, this would be a great choice. I started using it each day and now I can export the data to my excel budgets.