The concept behind Dollarbird (free), Transylvania-based Halcyon Mobile's first mobile app, is simple. It was designed to help you track income and expenses—past, present and future—so you can easily see the state of your cash flow up to five years in the future. At that, it succeeds. But the Dollarbird iPhone app flounders a bit in actual execution in terms of the user interface design. There's no central, standard navigational system, so it's confusing to use until you realize that it has only a few screens.
There's value in being able to view all your incoming and outgoing cash on the day that it's due and see whether you'll be in the black over the coming months and years. But how does Dollarbird work in tandem with your existing account-tracking and bill-paying systems? If you're doing any other kind of personal financial management, rest assured there'll be duplicate data entry.
If you're squeamish about downloading bank and credit card information and you're willing to enter absolutely every income and expense transaction, Dollarbird (funky navigation aside) may serve you well. But there are better, faster, more comprehensive apps for managing your money, namely Mint.com (free), our Editors' Choice.
Security
Most personal finance apps have a four-digit PIN feature to better protect your account. Some require it, and some leave it optional. Dollarbird makes it optional. This lack of security seems a bit less egregious when you realize that you won't be downloading live transactions from financial institutions like other apps allow. You don't even tell Dollarbird your name. The only text you'll ever enter gets attached to income and expenses.
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Still, you wouldn't want someone to pick up your phone and see personal details about your salary and other income, and how you spend your money. That's the reason for the optional passcode. If you do use DollarBird, employ that PIN. I'd prefer that it be mandatory.
Transaction Entry
As mentioned, Dollarbird requires manual entry. The benefit is that all your data is local, which is good if you are hyper secure. A similar app that keeps data offline is Checkbook. Both Dollarbird and Checkbook are very different from the automatic entry systems of Mint or, say, LearnVest, which pull line items and account balances from your financial institutions automatically. The latter is definitely more convenient, and eliminates human error.
To get started, you enter the balance of the financial account you want to track. A graphical calendar that appears serves as your work area. To enter income and expenses, you put your finger about three-quarters of the way down the screen and swipe downward. A plus sign appears momentarily, and then the display changes to a split screen, with predefined categories on top and a numeric keypad below.
The categories that appear are for expenses. A message flashes on the screen briefly, telling you to scroll down for income categories. There are only a handful of built-in categories, but you can easily add more. You can select a category by tapping it, and then you can use the keypad to enter the amount. Hitting the checkmark in the lower right of the screen saves the entry. You can also optionally attach a note to the transaction. And you can tap a circular arrow symbol to make the transaction a recurring one. When you do so, the bottom of the screen goes black, with small buttons marked Cancel, Repeat Every, and Save.
Tap on Repeat Every, and all you see is "1 Months" against the black background. You can swipe the 1 to display a different number (up to 50) and you can change months to weeks, but there are no options for daily, annual, or quarterly recurring expenses. When you've specified your interval, you click Save, and the icon lights up. Click the bell symbol, and you get a pop-up reminder on the day of the transaction, or one to four days prior.
Once you're finished, click the check mark or X in the keypad to return to the calendar. Your income, expenses, and balance will populate the targeted days (though you'll have to squint to see the numbers on the calendar, especially if you have multiple entries on the same day). Click on a day, and your transactions appear below the calendar. To delete one, you swipe left. To edit, click on the entry and the original data entry page appears.
Getting to the Bottom Line
Dollarbird has a small navigational tool at the bottom of the calendar screen that opens the Dashboard. This screen displays a graph that illustrates your cash flow for the current month, and two numbers: your current balance and the total amount you've spent to date in that month.
When you tap on the colored bar at the bottom, which is color-coded to match your categories, the Expenses screen opens, showing you how much you've spent in each category. Hit the back arrow to return. Click anywhere in the graph or swipe right, and the Balance screen opens, displaying a three-month graph and your projected balances. You can project out to five years in the future by clicking on the beginning and ending month and year, and changing them using the scrolling calendar that appears below.
You can't tap a spot on the graph to drill down on a month and see the underlying data. But a two-column table below it shows you how each month compares to the month before, displaying both your balance and the difference (with up and down arrows) from the month before.
A navigational wheel icon that appears on many screens opens your setting and utilities page. From here, you can upgrade to the Pro version ($4.99 per month), which offers multiple calendars, sync and backup, additional charts and a more detailed Dashboard, and budgeting.
A Simple Mission
Dollarbird does not function in any one currency. The numbers you enter can represent dollars or euros or whatever you want, which I can see being a problem if you travel abroad frequently. You won't be able to switch currencies, so your expense-tracking will only be accurate if you convert the money you spent into your home currency before entering it.
Dollarbird does what it says it does, albeit by using a user interface and navigational system that could be more intuitive. Get ready for a lot of manual data entry. Furthermore, I wish the company was more aggressive about security. If you're still writing checks for all your bills and you're not using any other personal finance applications, it may be a good cash-flow tracking solution for you. But if you want to avoid all that data entry and learn a lot more about your money, go to Mint instead. It's our Editors' Choice for personal finance apps.
Dollarbird may serve you well if you want to manually enter all your income and expenses to chart your projected cash flow for up to five years, but it has a bit of a learning curve. The app has been slowly improving, but not by leaps and bounds.
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