Tracking your spending habits and establishing a budget can be a completely life changing experience. To many people all over the world, it’s the difference between losing a house and keeping it, between stressing out about bills or managing them easily, and even between financial contentment and bankruptcy.

So if budgeting is so great, why do we all suck at it? Aside from the fact that it’s simply not fun to impose harsh rules on our consumer lifestyles, budgeting is usually a ton of work. You have to analyze your spending habits against income trends, decide what to allot where, perform daily calculations to see how you’re progressing and a lot more.

Fortunately, your iPhone can take much of the work out of this task. Today we’re going to look at one of the many budgeting apps available for iOS: iMoneyPadPro. This app boasts tons of features and comes with a hefty $10 price tag. Below we’ll walk you through how it works and then discuss whether or not it’s worth the investment.

Getting Started

Since you carry your iPhone with you pretty much at all times, it provides the perfect solution to staying on top of a budget. With a few quick taps you can track every dime you spend, view trends, make adjustments and see where you need to cut back.

iMoneyPad Pro is a powerful solution for tracking both your income and expenses as well as setting up budgets for various areas of spending. The app is divided up into four main functions: History, Budget, Analysis, and Automator.

History

The History screen is where you input your income and expense items as the occur. This screen is split into two columns and shows a month at a time. The left column allows you to sort transactions based on a specified criteria. You can either sort transactions by date, category or payment type (cash, credit, checking or savings).

History

To add a transaction, you simply tap the “Add” button at the top right of the screen. From this screen you can either input an expense, income or transfer.

Then you can set the amount and identify and account and category (you choose from a number of handy presets). You can also set a date just in case you’re inputing the transaction early or late. Finally, there’s a large notes area for any extra information that you want to remember.

New Transaction

Budget

Setting up a budget can be intimidating. Fortunately, iMoneyPad Pro makes the process extremely simple and completely customizable. You can be as brief or thorough as you like with your tracking.

How this works is you have the option to set an overall budget and/or create category specific budgets to be sure you’re staying on track in those troublesome areas such as eating out.

Budget

The meter at the top left shows you how much of your total budget you have left and the circular graphs below track your progress on individual category budgets. This is awesome for helping you make decisions about whether or not you can afford to go out or stay in. Simply check your budget and decide if you have enough of your monthly allowance left.

Analysis

Whether or not you’re interested in setting up a budget, it’s always cool to be able to track your history of financial transactions in graphical form. Simple visualizations really help you wrap your mind around complex data to spot trends and areas of interest.

Under the analysis section iMoneyPad Pro has a number of reporting options. You can view category comparisons and daily transaction histories in either bar or pie charts. You can also compare your six month income vs. expenses.

Analysis

Each chart is interactive and can be tapped and dragged around to view more information. The data is also shown in a list format below the chart.

Automator

The Automator helps ease repetitive tasks by allowing you to setup transactions that you would frequently enter in manually. Under this section there is two screens: activities and schedules.

Automator

Activities are a bit like a template for a transaction. So if you get paid the same amount for certain jobs or frequently order the same meal for lunch, you can enter the amounts of these transactions here and add them to your history as needed.

Schedules are for recurring transactions that come occur regularly such as bills. These run automatically on the intervals you set up so you don’t have to spend time entering them in every month.

The Verdict

iMoneyPad Pro is an awesome app. The interface is classy and fun to use and it has most of the features that you need to track your transactions and setup budgets. It’s not immediately apparent how to use the app when you first launch it but hitting the little “i” button on any screen will pop up a little tutorial showing you how that feature works. This is an awesome feature and really helps you get the most out of your money.

iMoneyPad Pro is a completely offline solution, which is both a pro and a con depending on what type of user you are. If you’re afraid of putting your personal transaction information online, this app is an awesome budgeting solution.

However, I’m personally an avid Mint.com user. I have all my various accounts entered into Mint and track them both in the web interface and through the iPhone app. The major benefits for Mint are that it is both completely free and completely automated. Instead of taking the time to enter in a transaction every time you buy a sandwich, Mint hooks up to your bank account and records this information automatically.

Because I’m used to the effortless budgeting and expense tracking of Mint, iMoneyPad Pro seemed like a lot of work. However, I know several people that will either never sign up for a Mint account or have signed up and just didn’t agree with the automated nature of the app. For this audience, iMoneyPad Pro is perfect.

Unfortunately, though I loved using iMoneyPadPro, I think its major downfall is definitely the price. On one hand, it does have a ton of really great functionality wrapped into a solid interface. Further, getting on track financially is well worth a measly $10. On the other hand, Jumsoft Money offers much of the same functionality, syncs with a Mac desktop app, and the iPhone app is completely free; a hard combination to beat!

Jumsoft Money

Conclusion

To sum up, iMoneyPad Pro is an excellent application with plenty of power and a slick UI. You can easily track both income and expenses, setup broad reaching and/or targeted budgets and analyze your financial data with attractive charts.

The major downfalls are the lack of an option for tracking transactions automatically, the hefty price tag and the lack of a companion desktop application.

Despite these issues, I can still definitely recommend the app to anyone who has tried Mint.com and Jumsoft Money but is still looking for an app that suits their particular needs better. Leave a comment below and let us know what financial tracking applications you use and how they stack up to iMoneyPad Pro.