Granted there’s no shortage of good-looking budgeting apps. That’s why when I stumbled across Back in Black budget the sheer excitement that normally accompanies my discovery of gorgeous pixels was completely unseen. It took a few moments, but I finally came to lust after the pixels. Back in Black was different. Not your average single-transaction app to manage your spending, but not a mess of a full-featured budgeting app, either. Back in Black does it all, and it does it damn well.
Back in Black splits up your budgeting on a monthly basis; there’s no other way to do it. Drawn out in some arousing pixels are the four main functions; Income, Fixed Expenses, Goals, and Spending. The app does away with the time-consuming fuss of managing multiple accounts and focuses on what’s most important: your money.
The Income view is simple enough and allows you to add all and any incomes, recurring as they may be. Fixed Expenses shows you a per-category breakdown of monthly musts with categories like Home, Auto, and Insurance. Granted you’re free to create your own categories with the extensive collection of finely crafted glyphs. Goals is something different, and something I love. For long I’d yearned for an app that would allow me to keep tabs on things I was saving towards, and the Goals section does just that. Whether it’s saving for school, a wedding, a new car, or just looking to pay off that credit card debt, the finely crafter pixels in Goals makes it tempting as ever to save. Spending is where things play out just as they do in most other budgeting apps. Select a category, set a budget, and spend away. Your spendings are always shown on the main screen so you know just how much green you have left to work with for the month.
One bonus with Back in Black – uncommon to most other budgeting apps – is Reminders. A simple option to give you a heads up (via push notifications) when payments are due for ay of your goals or fixed expenses.
At just $2.99 in the App Store, Back in Black budget is one very small purchase that will be indispensable in keeping a handle on the rest of them.