Appletell reviews ProOnGo Expense for iPhone

Genre: Finance
Developer: ProOnGo, Llc.
File Size: 1.5MB
Version Reviewed: 1.1
Requirements: iPhone OS 3.0 or later
Compatibility: iPhone or iPod touch (2nd gen)
Age Rating: 4+
Retail Price: $0.99

ProOnGo Expense with Receipt Reader is an application designed to make tracking your expenses on the iPhone both painless and powerful. It offers a variety of ways to enter the information you have and also allows you to both view and export this information in multiple ways that may be useful to you. Best of all, it does so in a simplistic manner that tries to stay out of the way to let you get your work done.

When you first open the application, you are presented with a list view of your expenses (see image below) that allows you to see where the expense was from, how much it cost, and when it took place. Tapping a blue arrow on the right side of each cell takes you to a more detailed view of the expense that can show further information such as comments and what category the expense belongs to. These categories can be created and edited as well, allowing you to make sure your expenses fit into your workflow.

In the list view, you are also able to filter what you see based on options such as time period and expense type (custom, mileage, time). You can also choose to sort them by merchant, amount, or date in ascending or descending order as well. This is done by tapping the middle item in the menu bar. Furthermore, tapping on an expense gives you the option to hide, edit, or duplicate it. These menu options are pretty self explanatory.

All that said, in order to have any information in list view to make it useful, you need to first add expenses. This is done by hitting “New” in the top right. The first option it gives you is to the program if this expense is in terms of mileage, time, or just a regular expense. Tapping each option gives you different information to edit, obviously. For instance, you can input the amount, change the date, add a comment, change the category, and alter the name of the merchant at which the expense took place. If you make a mileage expense, you can choose how many miles you went as well as where you started and ended using the GPS and Google Maps.

Interestingly enough, for regular expenses you can also choose to have it take a picture of the receipt and try to read it for you, which is nice. If you choose to do this, the app sends it to a Receipt Reader and analyzes it and then returns the results to your phone in a few minutes. It’s worth noting that this application was made with the iPhone 3GS autofocusing camera in mind, and the results from this feature aren’t very usable if you try it with an iPhone 3G.

Thankfully, the application does allow you to edit the receipt before you send it to their server in case you don’t feel safe doing so. You can conceal certain items on the receipt or turn it 90 degrees in any direction if you feel the need to do so. Once you send it to them, it is analyzed, and then you either get the results returned to you or are told that it couldn’t analyze them, in which case you are asked to verify if the information is indeed correct or if it should retry to analyze it.

Once you have the expenses added, you can do a lot with them outside of editing them. A nice feature of this application is the different ways you can view your expenses through the second item in the tab bar. Hitting it allows you to view your expense by amount in terms of a bar graph, line graph, or pie chart (see image below). It automatically adds keys and colors to the graph to make it extremely simple to see where you are spending the most money and at what times of the month, if need be.

Furthermore, ProOnGo also allows you to export your expenses as an Excel Spreadsheet, an XML file, a fax, or a QuickBooks report. You can choose to have these emailed to you so you can do with them what you want. It’s pretty cool, and it makes the application much more useful as the data can easily be sent to places beyond the iPhone itself.

Overall, I found the experience of using this application to be fairly pleasant. In terms of tracking expenses and the features you would want to go along with that, ProOnGo is perfect. The ability to view the purchases in charts right in the app makes it extremely easy to analyze your data, while the possibility of exporting it to other applications makes it just that much more useful. Also, the built in Receipt Reader puts the applications a step above some of the rest in terms of functionality. I’d certainly recommend this to someone interested in beginning to track their expenses. With a little bit more work on the interface elements, this application would be just that much better, though.

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