Spendbook for iPhone app review: meet one of the best expense trackers for iOS

Installing an income and expense tracking app is on the hot list of all "how to get out of debt" type articles on personal finance or general tip sites. The simple act of discipline shown by entering most of your expenses, and tracking your budget can put some order in the chaos that are our spending habits. There's no shortage of great iOS expense tracker apps, like Concur or Expensify, but there's a new kid in town now, called Spendbook, and it is looking might promising.

Spendbook's chief advantage is its feature-rich, yet clean and easy to master interface. On opening the app, you are greeted with an abundance of color-coded expense/income categories and subcategories that will cover most everything you can think of. If you are still not satisfied, you can edit, rearrange, or add new entries, too. 

Expense entry is done by a simple swipe down or tap gesture, and you only need to enter the amount, then tap on the category to get the entry filed in its respective place - no more annoying scrolling through drop-down menus and tons of unneeded options.

Besides a quick way to enter your expenses for the day, Spendbook allows you to make them recurring, with many periodic options to choose from with a simple tap. On a sidenote, you can set a general expense reminder from the app's settings, but you can't set individual ones, which is a pity.

Still, you can view all of your upcoming expenses in a daily or monthly calendar layout (sorry, no weekly option), so you can better prepare for what lies ahead. Spendbook lets you easily add notes and even photos to the transactions, so you know exactly what cocktails are the culprit for that $100 tab from last night. Unfortunately, there is no built-in OCR for scanning your receipts, but the concept of Spendbook is to keep it simple anyway. 

In addition to the photos, one can add short notes clarifying the expense, if all those (sub)categories don't suit. The app offers a few simple, but powerful charting options, too, which make following your budget development chronologically easy as pie.

All in all, if you are in the market for a great looking, simple to use expense and income tracking app for your iPhone, Spendbook is one of your best bets, as it combines a clean and easy to operate interface with a relatively rich amount of functions, plus it sports nifty charts and graphs that can visualize your reckless spending habits in utmost detail.