It seems unlikely that the word crisis would disappear from our life in the near future. Controlling our personal financial status has been always important but, these days, it seems even more important. There are many applications for financial management and banking supervision for the iPhone, hard to choose between a range this wide. Today we will analyze SplashMoney from SplashData. The version I’ve tested is 4.7.2, the update is made in December last year.

Let me begin by mentioning the fact that when you run SplashMoney for the first time, a screen appears with the option to read a quick guide. I think that many applications should take note of this detail; it is always useful to have a little help, when you use something for the first time.

Appearance: 3

Graphic design is simple but more than acceptable, it is not visually stunning, positively or negatively speaking. The concept is simple: a home screen with a pair of buttons on the top, a row of buttons represented by simple icons on the bottom and finally, occupying the center of the screen, the accounts. The accounts are represented by colorful icons.

The app also generates graphical reports using a 2D pie chart.

Features: 4

Occupying the central part of the screen, you can see the different types of accounts and products that you can manage: checking, savings, credit card, cash, asset, liability, money market and line of credit. We can add new accounts by clicking the “Edit” button at the top left. The fields to fill are: name, online banking, account number, bank, transaction, balance, currency and icon. Online banking is available only in the U.S.A., you can check the list of partner banks in http://www.splashdata.com/splashmoney/banks.htm

Data entry is simple, you just have to select an account, click the “+” button in the lower left corner and fill in the fields. You have a wide variety of choices to fit the vast majority of situations that arise us: paying bills, ATMs, deposits, payments, cash, etc., choose the category (car, gas, electricity, payroll, leisure , etc.), personal spending, businesses, etc., choosing a state of motion (balance reconciled, cleared, etc.), you can add comments, send e-mail template, split payments or receipts, purge accounts. What’s more, you can also add some more data field.

Some data will be stored in the application and these can be used in future movements, speeding up the process.

Other tools that we have by pressing the “Tools” button from the main screen are:

- Secure password protection using Blowfish encryption
- Scheduled transactions with reminders and Customizable transaction types
- Edit lists of data (payees, categories, currency, etc).
- Sync with SplashMoney Desktop computer software.
- User Guide.

As mentioned in the previous section, you can generate a pie chart (revenue or expense) to view your movements. We choose the period (monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.), the account, and mark the start and end dates, also the category.

There is also an option of budget planning. It allows you to determine the expenditure forecast and income have in each category. Then you check if you succeed, if you have fallen short or if you spent more.

Usability: 4

SplashMoney is an easy to use app and its simple interface doesn’t lead to confusion. As the data of the main financial flows are stored in the database, entering information will be fast.

I have come across an annoying bug, the application closes occasionally when entering data. I find that it happens more often when not complied with the order of data fields. From what I’ve seen in web forums of SplashData is a problem that the application has since its first version, but have been improving.

Another very common bug seen in the forums is the synchronization problems. I couldn’t check it because I haven’t used SplashMoney Desktop.

Value: 3.5

SplashMoney is sold in the App Store at a price of $4.99. It is more expensive than other applications of its class (as seen in the App Store, most abundant prices for similar applications is $3.99 or even less) but it is also one of the applications with more functions available. I’ve lowered the score a bit because of the bug I discussed earlier. I suppose in future updates developers will find solutions.

Conclusion

SplahMoney incorporates cool features like synchronization with the PC and the ability to operate online banking (only in the U.S.). Moreover, the range of settings and customization is wide. The simplicity of management and administration is a plus. By contrast, there still remains a problem in closing the application when data is entered. Checking the pros and cons, SplashMoney has more pros, as you can see in the final rating.

TOTAL: 3.625 out of 5.

DANIEL FERNÁNDEZ

NOTE: SplashData provided a licensed copy of SplashMoney for this review.