BillMinder – Never Forget to Pay Your Bills Again

If you are in a household like Shriya and I, you probably have 10-15 different bills you pay every month or every so often.

As much as I like to stay on top of things I still forget to pay a bill once in a few months. More often than not I am hit with some serious late fee. With a todo list manager like ToodleDo and an iPhone pretty much stuck on me 24/7, you’d think I’d be the last person to forget to pay a bill. Then you’d be really wrong.

I use Mint and Mint iPhone app for checking my account statuses and transactions on a daily basis. I even consider it one of the best finance apps for iPhone even though most of the functionality is in the service behind it than the app itself. But, I don’t have a way to quickly check my balances and see the upcoming bills I need to pay and bills that are going to be automatically paid from my bank accounts. Even if I had to use a separate app, I wanted it to do the job and do it well.

BillMinder iPhone and iPad seemed to fit the bill perfectly, pardon the pun if you will.

BillMinder’s goal is to let you keep track of everything that you pay, categorize the bills, setup automatic customizable alerts through push notifications, view upcoming bills, view history of payments and an overview of how much you spend on each category.

BillMinder is available for iPhone and iPad as separate apps. However, it ties all your devices with a single account so once you setup your accounts in one device, you can access it from any of your other iOS devices. This is a killer feature. Even if you lose your device you just need to login with your BillMinder account to sync your data from the cloud.

BillMinder iPhone App

Once installed, create a username/password combo with your email. Then start setting up your bills. I had all my bill reminders setup in Google Calendar so I just started moving one by one. Before you start adding though, try to create a few Categories in the tab for it. I tried to mimic the way I had categorized my Bills in Mint but you could do as you please or just stick with the defaults in the app.

BillMinder iPhone App

When you enter a bill you will notice that you can enter a title, assign an icon, optionally specify an amount, due date, how often it repeats (I like the flexibility here), alerts, autopay or manual pay, etc. Each bill entry pane also has a nice touch where you can add Contact info – Account number, phone number and website and also free form notes. Case in point – great to store phone numbers to call if you lose your credit or bank card or phone numbers to call and pay manually.

Any data you enter is automatically backed up so you don’t have to worry about syncing with your iTunes or worry about losing all the time you put in setting it up.

BillMinder iPhone App

Once you have setup your bills you can view your upcoming bills in a list view or in a Calendar view. Calendar view color codes your automatic and manual payment and is a great way to know when most of your bills are due to make sure you have enough money to cover it. For manual bills, you can just swipe across the bill to mark it as paid in the Upcoming tab – a nice feature.

Another nice feature of this app is the Reports section. It shows nice charts and graphs giving you a quick idea on how much you are spending on each category. You can also see your trends. Even though I use Mint for a deep look it is good to take a second look at the major chunk of my expense list.

BillMinder iPad App

I don’t see anything different with the iPad app except that it has been rewritten for the iPad’s larger screen and the charts look nicer. It is kind of odd that the developer didn’t make this an Universal app and charge 0ne price. It doesn’t make sense to pay $4.99 for the iPad version when the iPhone version which does pretty much the same things costs $1.99.

BillMinder iPad App

Of course, the visualizations look gorgeous on the bigger screen but you are using this app to save money. Right?

For a price less than a cup of coffee, I think BillMinder for iPhone is a worthy app to have. Especially if you have paid late fees even if it is once in a while. I would love to hear from the developer on the thinking behind the 2 apps and the price difference. I may be missing something here.

If this app ends up saving a bunch of money for me in terms of late fees, I’d even go as far to call this one of the best finance apps for iPhone that includes PageOnce Bills. We are planning on doing a best iPad finance apps like we did the best iPad apps for kids article. So, we are interested in hearing your suggestions in the comments.

Availability: 

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Price: $1.99 (iPhone)/$4.99 (iPad)

Reviewed at version: 3.3.1/3.1.1

Developed by: return7

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