Money Lover – Expense Manager. A must have Financial Management app
by Antonio Wells
Feb 14, 2012 7:49 AM –
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Money Lover – Expense Manager is a smart application to manage for finances using simple tools, plus it has more comprehensive tools at your disposal should you need them. Fully customizable, with tons of features for alerts & reminders, plus has support for multiple languages; will Money Lover be your all-in-one personal mobile financial management solution? Let’s get into the review!
Price: Free, $5.00
Tested on: DROID Bionic, Nexus One
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Loaded with features both simple and comprehensive for personal financial management!
- Stay on top of finances with transaction and debt reminders!
- Support for pattern lock to open app and automatic schedule of data backup!
- Produce charts and stats from data!
- Supports multiple profiles (in Premium version)!
Cons
- Does not have a cloud sync solution.
- Does not prompt for pattern lock to open feature by default, you have to enable from the settings menu.
Features:
Money Lover is a financial budget management app that can be used for simple tasks such as tracking income and expenses on up to smarter advanced tools such as debt management and budget reports.
The app supports multiple profiles (in Premium), for example in my case I set up one profile for personal and one for my office. It also can protect your data when you go to the settings to enable “Pattern Lock”, however, and sadly this is not enabled by default so we encourage you to head to the settings menu to enable this feature. Once you’re there, browse through the host of settings you can toggle. More importantly, have a look at the Auto Backup feature. From there you can set up scheduled backups of your financial data.
What I like about Money Lover is that you can use it on its simplest level of just adding your income and expenses to keep an eye on your finances, or you can use some of the more advanced features such as Budget Plan. This feature has Savings and Event Campaigns, Budget, Repeat Transactions, and Bill Management tools. There is a Debt Management feature for keeping up with receivables, a Cash Book which houses all of your transactions (income, expense, receivable, payable), and you may notice this as a separate app in your list of apps but it is just a shortcut directly to this portion of the app since you’ll probably use it most. If you prefer there are several ways to get Statistics; by category chart, transaction trends, monthly report or by budget reports. Money Lover even has a widget you can place on your home screen. Finally, there are other ancillary tools for Currency Exchange, a Tip Calculator, ATM & Bank Finder (simply a quick link to your Maps or default GPS navigation app), and Interest Rate calculator.
This is a pro for some and con for others, but the app does not have a cloud solution to sync financial data. I say pro as some are weary of the security of letting this type of sensitive data float into the cloud and worried about “Big Brother” watching over it. Others like myself view this as a con because of the convenience of automatic cloud services and we understand & accept the potential security and privacy risks they pose. However, there is a manual workaround to this by exporting your data and importing to another tool of your choice; so you just lose convenience factor.
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Money Lover
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Money Lover Cash Book
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Money Lover Budget Plan
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Money Lover Statistics
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Money Lover Add Transaction 1
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Money Lover Add Transaction 2
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Money Lover Select Category
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Money Lover Category Chart
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Money Lover Monthly Report
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Money Lover Tools
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Money Lover Search Transactions
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Money Lover Account Profile Manager
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Money Lover Database Features
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Money Lover Settings Features
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Money Lover Language Support
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Money Lover General Settings
Usefulness:
A financial management app should be an essential download for everyone.
Ease of Use:
Entering data is simple and straightforward… the tedious entry portion is what tends to become the drag. The app offers some small help in this regard by allowing you to speak some of your entry fields. That aside, I value how the monetary entry field has a calculator built in so if you wanted to compute a total within the app versus hopping out and into the Calculator app on your device, you can stay put.
Navigation is easy after you get adjusted to slight disorientation of being overwhelmed with many features the app offers.
Frequently Used:
The app is intended to be used multiple times daily or at the least on a daily basis. I could, however, see this being used as frequently… say weekly or monthly to tally financials and keep a track of things. This is your preference on its uses.
Interface:
The interface is quite gorgeous, vibrant, organized, color-coded and slick. It features slide-in animations for financials and even minute details like the host of vivid icons you choose from when you want to create custom categories.