Spb Finance is another one of those tools that, once you've used it for a while, you wonder how you could have possibly lived without it. It's a very focused program. It's all about making it simple and quick for you to record monetary transactions. The software helps you manage a number of different types accounts, including cash, bank, credit cards, assets and liabilities. You can record the amount of money you spend and where, exactly, it goes. The data entry is quick & simple and the entire program can be customized so that you get to define the currency type per account, your own list of categories & classes and large numbers of accounts & transactions. It also allows you to set up budgets that link, automatically, to your spending so that you can see, transaction by transaction, how well you're managing your money (if that's necessarily a good thing).

Accounts

The install is quick, simple and straight-forward. Not a surprise or issue to be found. When you launch the program, the first thing you need to do is set up an account. I started off with a cash account. It was so simple, a manual would be a waste of time. I picked the type of account, Cash. Then I got to input a name and description. Clicking next, you can use the US Dollars as a default or create your own currency entry (pieces of eight was tempting, but I stuck with US Dollars, besides, what is the exchange rate?). I counted the money in my pocket as an opening balance and I was done. It was that simple. It was so quick & easy that I went ahead and set up accounts for a couple of my credit cards that I use all the time.

You're left looking at a screen that shows your accounts in a list running down the page with the amount of money available in them. From here you can click & hold on an account to remove it, edit it or go to its transactions. You'll also see a total of your Current & Ending Balance of all accounts (unless you want to be depressed, make sure you put in your bank account so that all you see aren't negative numbers. Unless... Never mind). At the bottom of the page are three menu choices, of which, only New is context sensative, depending on the tab you selected. What? I didn't mention the tabs? You've got three tabs, Accounts (where, we're at), Register & Budgets. More on the other menu choices later, on to the Register.

Transactions

The Register is where you enter transactions, positive or negative, that affect your accounts. Like the rest of the tool, this is simple to use. In this case though, I would recommend referencing the manual because there a few details that are not completely intuitive. If you've entered transactions, you'll see a running list of them here. This list is sortable by various types of data. It defaults to sorting by date, descending (newest transactions on top). The menu choices have changed slightly. The New choice is still there, except clicking it now will open the new Transaction screen instead of Accounts. Two other menu choices remain the same, View & Tools. More on those later. The other two choices are a drop down called "Toggle View Mode" which changes the view from a widely spaced, informative look at each transaction to a narrow, less informative listing of the bare minimum of information and an epsilon that, when clicked, turns on, or off, the running total instead of a simple list of transactions. The option for looking at transactions for a single account or all accounts is available from a menu at the top of the screen.

Entering a transaction is pretty easy. Clicking on the New menu choice will open the entry screen. The account you're currently working in is defaulted at the top in a drop-down list, but you can switch to another account for the transaction you're working on from right here. The software very flexible for data entry. The focus of the entry is on three fields, Payee, Payment and Category. Payee is the person, business or place that is taking your money. Payment is the amount of money they're taking away from you. When you click in the Payment entry box, a nice little calculator pops up. You can simply use this to tap in a value or even do some simple math to arrive at a value. Category is a way of defining how you're spending your money. Category comes populated with a number of general categories, such as "Food", with sub-categories below them, such as, "Dining Out" or "Groceries." The list is categorized within itself as either Income or Expense. You can immediately, from this screen, add new items by clicking the "New" button next to the drop down.

I said the program was customizable and it is. You're given a number of other editable fields on the Transaction screen that let you further categorize, mark & modify the transaction. First is a field called "Ref" that is a transaction Reference number. Yeah, I don't know what that's for either, but it's there and you can use it. You can modify the date of the transaction. You're given the option of marking a transaction as "c", Clear, or "R", Registered. Hey, ask my wife, she manages the money in this house. I've just a great new tool that supply her with the information she likes. There is also a fully customizable list called "Class." For example, you could mark a series of transactions while you're on vacation as a class of "Vacation." This allows you to still categorize the transactions as you normally would,"Food - Dining Out," but all those transactions can be gathered up so you can see how much you spend on Vacation. Wait, maybe that's not such a good idea. You've also got a tab on the Transaction screen marked "Memo." I guess I could explain what that's for, but then, I wouldn't have time to move on to Budgets.

I've only got how much lunch money left?

The last tab on the main screen is the "Budgets" tab. Here you get to define a budget. Finance is set up so that the Budgets are directly linked to the Categories that you use when creating Transactions. That's right, each Transaction is automatically registered against your budget for that transaction. The menu choices on the "Budget" screen are the same as on the "Accounts" screen. The top of the screen has changed. At the top you get to enter "To" & "From" dates to show budgets over a given time frame. Click on the "New" menu opens the Budget entry screen. First, you have to select a Category or sub-category to budget. Then, you get to enter an amount and a time frame, anything from "Every Month" to particular months and even "Current Month." That's it. Now you'll see that going out for sushi on Tuesday wasn't such a good idea if you both want to eat on Friday and stay under budget. Selecting a category for a budget includes all the sub-categories for that budget.

Pretty Pictures: AKA Reports

Since my wife frequently uses budget graphs and profit & loss charts to show me just how broke we are, I'm fairly familiar with these things. I'm shocked by how many they've managed to jam into this little app. Clicking on the "View" menu from any of the main tabs will allow you to select "Reports." Once there, you're presented with a list: Net Worth, Account Balances, Profit & Loss, Spending by Category, Income & Expense, Transactions. I won't go over each and every one. Suffice to say that each report is fully customizable. Depending on the report, you can change the type of report from bar, to line, to pie, to table. Again, depending on the report, you change the date range that the report covers. Each report also shows you a menu called "Customize" where you can select the Accounts, Categories, Classes and Currency for the report.

Way Cool Features

How about a tie-in to the Today screen? Ok. How about two? From the "New" menu on the Today screen you can select "Spb Finance Transaction" and you'll be taken straight to the transaction entry screen. Just select the account you want to edit and you're off. You can also show Account information right on the Today screen itself. The "Options" screen includes a tab, "Today" where you can select any number of your accounts to display right on the Today screen. Clicking on the account info on the Today screen takes you to the Register for that account.

Not enough? How about security? You can set a password on your file and it will enable an AES algorithm,Rijndael, and require you to enter the password every time you enter the program. A little pet peeve of my own didn't cause a problem here, because unlike a lot of passwords on PDA programs, this one lets you enter symbols & numbers.

Do you use MS Money or one of those other money management programs on the desktop. Then you might be interested in Finance's ability to export to QIF files. Not enough. OK. It imports them as well.

I'm a DBA by trade, so paranoia is a way of life. How happy was I when I saw that you could run backup and restore against this data.

I've saved the best for last. Finance is smart. It can learn about your transactions. The first time you create a transaction, it gets added to a little list called "Memorized Transactions." Then, as you type in a Payee, a list will drop down. For example, I've got two entries that start with "C". When I put "C" into the Payee field, a drop down list showing "Cafeteria" and "Cumberland Farms" shows up. Clicking on one of the entries will show you the last amount entered for that Payee. At the "Memorized Transaction" list, you can edit the entries so that for a given payee, a particular amount is there. For example, I usually have the same thing for breakfast every day, so I created a transaction called "Cafeteria - Breakfast" and edited the amount to reflect the amount of the yogurt I buy. I also eat at the Cafeteria for lunch, so I entered "Cafeteria - Lunch" but I'm not worried about the amount because I get different things. The tool remembers both these and will let me pick them. I can enter my breakfast entry with just a few taps. You can also lock the transactions, which I did with my breakfast, so that if I did get something different one day, the original would still pop up with the same amount. This is a great feature.

Further Customization

As mentioned above, you can edit the Categories. Finance lets you modify the existing categories, rearrange them placing sub-categories under sub-categories, and delete them. You cand add your own. The interface, like all the rest in the program is quick & easy to use. Adding Classes is just as simple. Simpler. You can add Classes which are composed of a class name and a description. That's it. Adding currencies is simple enough. Selecting "Currencies" from the "View" menu will open up the list of currencies in the system. By default it's a whopping list of one, US Dollars. Clicking on "New" lets you enter a Name, add a symbol (yen, pounds, & euro were readily available on my english machine). Then you simply enter exchange rates for whatever to dollars and from dollars to whatever. You can even customize transactions. There is a little tool called "Split" that will let you break down a transaction into multiple small entries, like if you wanted to itemize a credit card purchase or something.

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Basic Facts

• Application name: Spb Finance
• Tested version: 1.0
• Author: Spb Software House
• Trial Download: Pocket PC (ARM, MIPS, SH3)
• Purchase: US$ 19.95 @ PocketGear.com (Affiliate link)

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