[tweetmeme]Partly a byproduct of my technolust, I’m usually strapped for cash. Buying a new iPhone every year, buying stacks of video games every month, and downloading new iPhone apps every day has put a serious dent in my wallet. But I’ve still gotta take care of my real life expenses. I’ve gotta pay rent, utilities, and gym fees. But it gets easy to lose track of when bills are due. And in Japan, you don’t wanna be overdue with money you owe. Creditors have a nasty habit of employing the yakuza to strong-arm you into paying. And don’t even think about trying to run. Should the yakuza fail to get money owed, there have been instances of squads of highly trained ninjas to track you down and make sure you never default on a payment ever again. So unless I was willing to undertake years of arduous training to ensure I was the strongest ninja in all the land, I was gonna have to make sure I never missed a payment. Luckily, there’s Bills for iPhone from PoweryBase, so I never have to dodge a shuriken again.

What does Bills do?

Bills is a payment manager and push notifier. It’s biggest selling point is its connection to the cloud. You can sync your bill schedule to powerybase’s website (where you can use a keyboard to mass enter in payment details) and get push notifications when your bills are due. As for the app’s capabilities on the phone itself, you can use preset categories and create your own to organize upcoming bills so you can keep track of which ones you have coming up. The dashboard in Bills shows you drop-down lists of bills due today, due within 30 days, overdue, or set to alert you that they’re due soon, based on pre-alerts that you can set up on a per-bill basis. You get pretty granular control of your notifications. When creating a bill, you can assign a name, category, price, due date, pre-alert date, whether it’s a repeating bill or not, if it should consider itself auto-paid on the due date, and notes. All of these can be edited after the fact, unless it’s a repeating bill. In that case, due date and frequency of repeat can’t be changed. You’d have to delete the payment and recreate it, which, if you make a mistake and accidentally save it, can be kind of a pain in the ass. A huge plus to the creation process is that you can choose which currency the bill is to be paid in. In the settings you can assign a “home currency” which will auto-assign itself to all new bills, but when creating a new bill, you can change this to any currency. It’s very helpful for me since I live in Japan and pay my main bills in yen, but I still have American credit cards that have to be paid in dollars. I wish more finance apps recognized the need for multiple currency support. (I’m looking at you Cha-Ching.)

Aside from the dashboard, there are calendar and category views that you can pull up. I guess, should you need to schedule bills far in advance, or if you’re just curious about checking out when you’ve paid bills in the past, the calendar could be useful, but I hardly ever look at it. Usually, when I do see it, it’s because I tapped on it by accident. Categories are as useful as you might imagine. From the Categories tab, you can create and edit categories. I deleted all sorts of useless ones that were included in the app, and made some that were a little more useful to me. They even let you choose from a bunch of different icons that aren’t even used by the preset categories. The category icons are all very nice looking, but for some reason, the phone icon looks like a Sony-Ericcson model, and not like an iPhone. I guess using an iPhone image is a no-no in the App Store.

Need Another Finance App?

The app has its uses. It’s nice being able to track payments separately from other tasks. I had been using Things to keep track of payments due, but it’s nice to keep them away from everything else. While I like that my tasks in Things are less cluttered, my iPhone now has yet another app on it. I also have to look for another place to keep track of information. The push notifications do negate that for the most part. Then again, the iPhone has a nasty habit of canceling out previous push notifications when a new one comes in though, and you might worry that you’re going to miss notifications from Bills because somebody sent you a poke on Facebook. Also be warned that Bills doesn’t track balances. It’s mainly just for keeping track of when you need to pay bills. This isn’t going to replace your current finance app probably. If the push stuff and syncing to the cloud seems useful to you, Bills is a good-looking app that isn’t too expensive. You can purchase it in the App Store for $1.99.