I like to have the latest and greatest gadgets, but like a lot of people I am not good at keeping a budget.  I don’t have a lot of money to keep track of my problem is it kept disappearing and by the end of the month I would be left with nothing. It wouldn’t be so bad if I knew where it was going to, but I didn’t. I decided I needed a method to keep track of my money. I tried Mint unfortunately I couldn’t get my small local bank to connect.  When it finally did, my bank changed how they did their passwords and it didn’t work again. I finally decided I wanted something simple and that wasn’t directly connected to my bank account.

The application that works best for me is Account Tracker, it is available for iPhone and iPad. It is a simple application to use. When you first open it up you will see five tabs at the bottom: accounts, budgets, transaction, reports and settings. The first thing you need to do is set up an account. To do this click on the account icon at the bottom then the plus symbol at the top right corner. You can then name the account, set the opening balance, whether you want an alert limit or not among other options. Once you have all your accounts set up, you can start adding transactions. To add a transaction you click on the plus button right above the transaction tab. Once you are on the transaction screen you need to choose whether it’s an expense or income, the account you are using (if you have multiple accounts), who you are paying or receiving money from, the category it belongs in, date of the transaction, the amount, whether it repeats and do you want a reminder.

Once you have used the application for a month you can start viewing reports. There is a graph showing the balance flows over a 31 day period. Another chart with your cash flow. A third and forth graphs show spending first by category and then with more details.  Finally there are the charts showing income and transfers. The final tab is the setting tab. In the setting tab you set up backup to either Dropbox or iCloud. You can also set up how far ahead you want to look, when the week and month start. Under security there is option to set up alerts and a pin number.

Account Tracker’s biggest negative is it only works if you use it. Unlike applications like Mint or Quickbooks nothing happens automatically except repeating transactions. You have to add all other transactions manually. There is a free version of Accounts Tracker, but it is very limited. The full version is $2.99 and in my mind well worth the price. If you are looking for a simple way to keep track of your money I recommend Accounts Tracker. Gary Haley the developer is working on a Mac version, which I plan to down load as soon as it is available. There is no plan for an Android application.