Bill Burner – Budget & Reminder app for Android
by Antonio Wells
Jul 23, 2012 5:07 PM –
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Bill Burner – Budget & Reminder is a financial management app intended for the savvy to keep track of their budget(s) on their Android device. You can configure notification reminders, get daily, weekly, monthly or annual budget projections, and generate a graph of your spending.
Price: Free, ~$2.04
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy S3
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Keep track of and manage your budget in your Android!
Cons
- The app does not intend for any online syncing & backing up nor editing on computer or web, therefore budget management can only be performed on a sole device (unless you send a backup to another device).
- The graph is a nice touch, but text is so tiny and the line graphs have no purpose that it renders the feature useless.
Features:
Bill Burner offers a fare amount of features to encourage you to manage your budget on your Android. You can manage several accounts, say for personal and business if you like. As with many financial management apps you bare the burden of manually entering all of your bill information, future due dates and amounts at initial setup. Once your bill is due you will receive a notification reminder at the top of your device. There is no way to dig in granular and set specific times of reminders, but you can set the general time of day and reminder sound, for example, set your bill reminder to go off early in the morning on due dates.
The unique feature spotted here is that you can slide the “Deposit/Withdrawal” toggle or manually enter amounts to add or subtract from your budget and your bills will adjust accordingly. My gripe here is that I could not get this feature to work as shown in the video (see my expenses all stuck at $0.00), but it is intended to recalculate your bills accordingly (this is only useful if you enter the total or annual amount on recurring bills).
One nifty feature I found was the “Average” feature, which has options to show you an expense breakdown per day, week, month and year; plus shows the percentage allocation of expenses. In testing the app I plugged in a few of AndroidTapp.com business expenses and generally got a reminder of where we allocate most of our resources. Nothing mind-boggling, but nifty facts for the financial savvy.
Lastly, the app encourages you to backup information essentially after every session you manipulate data, and can be backed up or restored with one click. However, in reviewing similar apps, I personally felt the app could use an auto-backup feature in addition to ad-hoc occurrences. Speaking of backups, its file will only be usable within the app and you cannot transfer it to a computer as a spreadsheet to manage finances there.
Maybe I am spoiled by new financial management apps that have services tied to them to more efficiently bring convenient context to my situation. Such as apps like Mint, which syncs with your bank to check off if a bill has been paid or not. The disconnect I see in an app like this is that you have to be more proactive and meticulous about managing both within the app and actual transactions with your bank. Just makes managing things a bit counter-productive.
Watch on Mobile
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Bill Burner Accounts
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Bill Burner Enter New Account
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Bill Burner Enter Bill Information
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Bill Burner List of Upcoming Bills
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Bill Burner Bill Detail
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Bill Burner Deposits and Withdrawals
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Bill Burner Bill Averages Over One Day
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Bill Burner Bill Averages Over One Year
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Bill Burner Graphs
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Bill Burner Settings
Usefulness:
Managing finances and budgets should be a blanket statement for many, but not all people do. However, for those who do not care to have their sensitive personal data stored in the cloud and shared with other services, a personal budgeting app may be really useful.
Ease of Use:
Most of the input actions are intuitive, however, when you get into some of the other app features it may require you to watch the demo video to fully understand their function, i.e. Deposits/Withdrawals slider.
Frequently Used:
If you use this app, it could be something you use frequently depending on how many bills you have setup.
Interface:
The interface is a bit bland but gets the job done. The green and red shaded backgrounds represent how much of your top up deposits that have been allocated for the bills, however, this is not intuitive to know unless you watch and read the video tutorial. The user experience can be vastly improved in this regard.