Day 6 without my iPhone

Today was a day for contacting Apple to see where my repaired/replaced iPhone is. Thanks to the nice people at ups.com, I've been able to track its movements. Apparently it left Apple HQ in the UK early this morning, was last recorded in Dublin this evening, and should reach me in Galway tomorrow morning. Needless to say, I can't wait. Just hope they were able to fix it.

So I'm almost free of the non-iPhone drudgery of the past week or so.

I've been too bust at work today to miss any of the games I play on the iPhone, so I won't write about those just yet. However, one app comes to mind as being something I normally use on a daily basis: it's called HomeBudget with Sync.

There is a free Lite version, but I use the fully featured version, currently €3.99 in the App Store. The free version doesn't have the "sync" function, and that's one of the best bits about this app. What's it for? Well, it's simply a way to track what you spend and what you earn over time. You can easily set up regular recurring incomes (such as salaries) and regular outgoings (mortgage, car repayments, etc.), but where the app really comes in handy is for recording those occasional little (and sometimes not so little) expenses. Things like cups of coffee, right up to fuel for the car. Anything you spend money on can be recorded in the pre-installed categories, and if you have a one-off expense, it's very easy to set up your own category for it.

So why is the paid version worth €3.99? Simple: it lets you use any number of iDevices and automatically syncs in the cloud between them. And if you use the same Apple ID when installing, you can have it on more than one device for the single €3.99 fee. So we have it on my iPhone, my wifes iPhone and our iPad, all for €3.99. And when I put an expense in on my iPhone, it appears on my wifes app automatically when she opens it on her iPhone. And on the iPad, when the app is started there. Great way to keep an eye on those expenses.

The app can then summarize your outgoings either based on a series of dates, or by category. So it can help identify where the largest expenses are, and possibly identify where savings can be made too. It graphs all this on a trend line showing your projected income and estimated expenses into the future too, based on past data. Brilliant, and sometimes scary.

So for the last few days I've not been able to input things like coffee, fuel for the car, or groceries like I normally would. Luckily I made some notes, and although the app defaults to entering details for the current day, you can back-date entries too.

Hopefully I'll have my iPhone back tomorrow, so I'll let you know how that goes!