Review: SplashMoney – Manage Your Personal Accounts With Ease

Review: SplashMoney
[Rating:8] 8/10
Cost: $29.95@ the Berryreview Store

I am a faithful user of the free Jabplite and a faithful “free is always better” thinker. So I was very willing to review SplashMoney when given the chance. I was interested to find out if a “pay” program is better than my “free” program. So I downloaded it and found out a couple of things that would make me reconsider my “free is better” thinking.

Upon download, SplashMoney comes with a few accounts already preset. You are very easily able to delete these accounts and recreate your own. When setting up your accounts, it’ll be very handy to have your account info, such as account numbers and balance to help you along the way. Of course, you can always enter the information in at a later time.

SplashMoney can be password protected which is a plus as your account information has been entered. Heaven forbid you lose or even have your Berry stolen! Once you get past the password protection, you are able to see your accounts listed in alphabetical order. Hit “menu” and you have the ability to create, edit, or delete accounts.

You can make transfers between accounts, which helps when transferring money from a checking to a savings account or a checking to a credit card account. For all you die-hard bookkeepers and checkbook balancers, you also have the ability to create reports and make budgets. In this menu, you can even set up your accounts to automatically pull information from your banks. Although this function is limited to preapproved banks. Bank of America, Citibank and Washington Mutual are popular banks that are not preapproved.

Click an account and you will see detailed transaction information consisting of the date of transaction, payee and payment amount. From here, you can reconcile, or even purge transactions to keep your memory open. Your account balance is listed on the bottom of the screen.

If you click on the “manage” you can add new payees, categories, classes, currencies, transactions types and scheduled transactions. Here you can also access functions to make SplashMoney more secure according to your tastes.

After playing with SplashMoney for a bit, I have found it to be a very indispensable program. The ability to reconcile with my online accounts would’ve been an awesome addition to the program had my bank been on the list. Too bad there isn’t a way to have them added or to add them yourself. In the end I’ve decided that in this case, a pay program is way better than a free program!