Pros Simple interface. Type-ahead suggestions.
Cons No passcode protection. No real budgeting or expense-tracking features. No syncing.
Bottom Line Dozens of personal finance apps are all vying for your time and attention. Don't give yours to Bought. It's a dud.By Jill Duffy
Personal finance apps are a dime a dozen (good bargain, right?). They typically aim to help you manage your money better or sometimes even automatically. No matter how foolish you are with your money, don't shell out $1.99 for the iPhone app Bought (the full name is "Bought - A Beautiful Expense Tracker"). I wouldn't quite say it lives up to its claims of beauty, though it is extremely simple in design and use. The fonts look great. The color scheme is sparse. Design-wise, Bought reminds me a lot of the to-do app Clear, an app that looks great but fails to provide many of the most basic tools for the problem the app seeks to solve. Bought is even worse than Clear at delivering relevant features. Worse, it provides no protection whatsoever for the details of your financial life that you record. As far as personal finance apps go, Bought is a dud.
When you launch the Bought app, you notice that you don't have any options to create an account (which means there's no syncing across devices) or even to set up a passcode. All personal finance apps must have an optional passcode to help you protect another person from seeing information about your spending habits, where you bank, and so forth. The fact that Bought doesn't have one means it's already dead in the water, as far as I'm concerned, but I carried on testing anyhow, for completeness' sake.
A short, two-page tutorial introduces you to the interface. Tapping the screen adds an expense. Pinching outward can also add a new expense entry. The expense entries consist of nothing more than two fields, one for a name or description and the other for the amount. When you start to type an expense, a list of type-ahead suggestions appears.
Swiping any expense line item deletes it, and swiping up in the app takes you to a calendar view. You can tap on an expense to edit it, though you can't actually change the calendar date associated with the expense when you do. If you make a mistake on the date, you have to scrap the entry and start over. There's also a pie graph view, but it's completely useless, as I'll explain in a moment.
The list of what's missing is long: an optional passcode, categories for classifying expenses, a payee field, and the ability to add accounts or track different accounts separately. Because there are no classifications, the pie charts that the app creates have no meaning. They just list the percentage of total money you spent on every single expenditure, rather than lumping together similar expenses.
These missing pieces are just the basics. If the app were trying to be a more comprehensive personal finance app, you might want budgeting tools, notifications for when you're about to exceed those budgets, bill-pay reminders, savings plans, an interest calculator, or heck, even some rudimentary advice about how to properly track your spending. Bought doesn't have any of them.
Given everything that Bought doesn't have, it's basically as good as creating a text note in the stock Notes app and jotting down your expenses there. Well, at least the information there would sync to other devices.
Bought doesn't try to be a very in-depth or automated personal finance app. It aims for simplicity, but it l fails to provide any of the tools you would want in even the most basic of personal accounting apps. Use Mint instead for a more complete and automated experience, or Checkbook (free, or $2.99 for the Pro edition) if you want a simple, offline way to reconcile your expenses manually via a mobile app.
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