SPB Finance

WMExperts received a request after the initial reviews of financial applications to take a look at SPB Finance($24.95). SPB is quickly establishing itself in the Windows Mobile application arena with popular applications such as SPB Mobile Shell and SPB Pocket Plus. With such a strong reputation, SPB Finance should be a quality application that will help you keep track of your finances from your Windows Mobile device. We’ve given it a road test and all that’s need is for you to read on to see how well SPB Finance balances the budget.

As with other financial applications, SPB Finance isn’t a real flashy application. What it is a pretty decent financial application that will let you track, budget and create reports on your financial activities. SPB Finance also has the ability to synchronize with Quicken and Microsoft Money.

The main screen of SPB Finance is tabbed allowing you to navigate from your account overview, registers, budget creation and reports. Your first step is to create a new account by selecting the style of account, naming the account with description, currency to use and the beginning balance. The account overview tab will list the accounts as well as current balances.

Highlighting the account will take you to the account’s registry where you can enter payments and deposits by tapping “new”. The transaction entry screen is simple and straight forward. You simply fill in the blanks and the only nit I have with regards to navigation, is that in the fields that require numeric entry, you will have to have to use the Option key if you enter the amounts from the QWERTY keypad. A drop down calculator appears when you move to such a field but it would be nice if you could enter numeric values without using the Option button.

The Budget tab allows you to create budgets according to expense categories. As you enter a transaction under the budgeted category, this expense or credit is reflected on the budget screen.

SPB Finance has a very comprehensive report generator. Eight customizable report styles allow you to look at everything from your Net Worth to Profit/Loss to Transaction Reports based on dates, categories, and payee. Reports can be customized and saved for future reference.

Navigation with SPB Finance was easy with either the tap screen or keypad. Drop down menus make switching from account to account and report to report very easy. You do have a Today Screen plug-in that will show your account balances and tapping the account on the plug-in will take you directly to that registry.

There is no means to download transactions from your bank but that’s not necessarily a big loss. Accounts can be password protected, exported, archived, backed up and searched.

SPB does include a Finance Entry application that makes the entry of recurring transactions easier to tackle. This application appears to be more of an add-on and the layout uses larger buttons and has customizable preset payees. This is a nice feature to use for those pesky monthly bills that keep on giving. The downside to this feature is that it’s not the easiest to setup and to be honest, it began to be more trouble than worth. After struggling with this feature, I found it just as easy to use the regular entry screen and rely on the drop down menu to select common/re-occurring payees.

Overall Impression

The more I used SPB Finance, the more I liked it. Granted the accounts were fictitious and the balances made it all the more fun to use but even when using real accounts, SPB Finance ($24.95), was enjoyable to use. It put a lot of information about my finances at my finger tips.

I wouldn’t mind seeing that ability to download transactions from your financial institution or have automatic keypad numeric entry in the amount fields without having to use the Option button but as is, it’s a very good application for those who need to keep up with their finances. I really like the budget function and can see it help track expenses on a monthly or weekly basis.

I manage my accounts on a laptop using Quicken so being able to synchronize SPB Finance with my laptop program is a benefit. As a stand alone application, SPB Finance will go a long way towards balancing your budget and help you keep better track of your financial empire. While I had a few headaches with the Entry application, SPB Finance is definitely worth a trial download if you're on the lookout for a financial application.