If there's a ready-made application for a mobile device, it's bill paying and personal finance. It should be a relatively low-overhead application that needs to receive frequent updates and be aware of and communicate with other applications like credit cards and banks. Mobile payments and banking has really grown in parts of the developing world for precisely these reasons. Even low-end Android phones can easily run the needed apps. This should be a slam-dunk for iOS.
At first glance, it is. You've got a million personal finance apps out there including the well-regarded Mint and Check. Banks and credit cards have their own apps too, though these are not typically designed to be full personal finance solutions but instead to facilitate things like balance inquiry and bill paying.
In fact, the two areas all these apps seem to concentrate on are expense categorization and mobile payments. While useful, these two applications on their own are insufficient to meet my needs for household money management (I can't speak to the needs of running a small business so my comments here are restricted to personal finance). I don't really need to be told where my money went; I'm interested in knowing where it will go, and what my bank balance will look like at any given point in the future. In our household we have a pretty good handle on expenses; we're not over-spending all the time on frivolous stuff, so there's very little eye-opening information to be gained by slick categorization of past spending. I'm really surprised that the various apps I've either researched or tried cannot do this. Even Quicken has difficulty with bank balance forecasting and replacing that forecast with actual results as they occur. Something that you'd think would be really valuable: will my checking account have enough money in it at any given point into the future, based on my current and projected spending? Seems like an easy question to answer but I've not yet found an app that does it. If you know of one, let me know!
Full disclosure: a couple months after installing Mint and linking all our accounts to it, we had multiple instances of fraud on 2 different cards. I can't say with certainty that it was the fault of Mint because I have no proof, but I strongly suspect Mint was somehow to blame. I changed my card numbers and stopped using Mint immediately, and we haven't had fraud since. That experience soured me on giving out all that banking and credit card info to some app, no matter how highly-regarded. Your appetite for risk may be different, and maybe it was just coincidental timing for me, but I'm not sold on those apps.
Setting aside security issues of linking accounts, and since I need an app that budgets future cash flows and banking balances, replacing that budget with actuals on the fly throughout the month or year, I've decided to continue to use a spreadsheet that does this cash forecasting for us with a minimum of manual input. We've used this spreadsheet for 4 or 5 years now and it works for us. It's in Google Docs and while editing complex formulas is a pain in the neck on iOS, simple quick data entry is actually quite easy and I've been fairly happy with using my iPad for that so far - but the setup was all done on a real computer using the Google Sheets web interface. If I have to make minor edits to things I can probably live with the inconvenience on iOS, but I'd never, ever want to have built this spreadsheet from scratch using iOS, even with a bluetooth keyboard; it would take 10 times as long (at least) and be fraught with frustration.
The one catch to the spreadsheet is that I can't download a transaction .csv file from the Capital One app on my iPad (Capital One being our primary credit card where almost all of our credit card spending goes); I have to go through the web browser. Oddly, Google Drive can't open the resulting .csv, and it's impossible to open it in Numbers and copy/paste into Google Sheets (you can't copy cells from Numbers and paste them into Sheets). So I'm a little stuck on how to easily get my credit card transactions in to the Google spreadsheet (I'm not going to key them all in, let me tell you). It would probably work better to port my budget spreadsheet over to Numbers, which deals fine with the .csv file and could easily integrate it into the overall budget spreadsheet. That would take a lot of work, though, since it's already working great in Google and it's got a tab for every month of the year and a decent amount of formulas. Of course I could use my work PC to do the once-per-month transaction download, or use the PC to more quickly port the budget spreadsheet itself to Numbers, but that would be going against the spirit of this little experiment!
Bottom line is this: if you want simple, easy categorization of expenditures and automatic download of transactions from your bank and credit cards, there are tons of apps out there like Mint and Card that do that. But if you have specific needs that only a home-brew solution like a spreadsheet can fulfill, there are some definite headaches in creating said spreadsheet in the first place, or importing data into that spreadsheet. Light data entry is no problem in iOS in either Numbers or Google Sheets.
So this post is actually less about personal finance applications themselves than it is about an unexpected difficulty in living iOS-only: taking a simple, downloaded file and uploading into an existing spreadsheet. It makes sense that iWork/Numbers can do this; after all, it's Apple's recommended spreadsheet solution for OS X and iOS. I'm surprised Google Docs can't read the .csv file from my iPad since it deals fine with .csv files on the PC.
