One of the most popular categories of third party software for PDAs and smartphones is personal finance - loan calculators, expense trackers, and others. The biggest and most useful of them all is personal checkbook applications.

Mobile users are often technical folks who use Quicken or Microsoft Money to manage their personal finances. When you enter transactions into Quicken or Money, it is quite often difficult to remember the details of every transaction since it may have been a few days since it was made. So why not use your BlackBerry to record the details of the transaction as it's made, while it is fresh in your mind, and then sync with your computer when you get around to it?

There are now a variety of personal finance applications available for the BlackBerry to choose from. Some of them stand by themselves, while others integrate with Quicken or Money on your PC. Here's a review of three of the most popular personal finance applications currently available for Research In Motion's wireless handhelds.

Ascendo Money

Ascendo Money costs $14.95 and does most of what you need in a finance program. You can create multiple accounts, enter transactions, and maintain a balance in each of the accounts.

The icons and text are professional in their appearance and consistent with most applications that run on a BlackBerry. It also has a couple nice features that set it apart from the other programs.

Transaction View

Sync

For example, it can filter transactions in an account by amount and by date. It can also sort transactions in an account by those fields as well.


                  Summary View

Ascendo Money also lets you delete transactions in bulk based on date. Just enter a date and all transactions on or before can be deleted in one fell swoop. The user interface seems to be the most polished of any of these programs. You can also customize the colors used by the application.

Wisespent

Wisespent is a great program that adds some nice features to the standard list of most applications in this space. It is the most expensive, at $22.95, of any of the three we reviewed.

Perhaps, most importantly, it supports automated backups in the most formats of all the software in this roundup as well. Wisespent is also the only program that handles recurring payments, which comes in handy for monthly bills.


              Transaction View

It includes category support for transactions, so you can keep gas entries separate from grocery bills, for example. You can also add new categories and filter transactions based on them. Wisespent automatically sets up archives for your transactions by month and year.


                Summary view

The program also supports the most languages and currencies of any of the three programs reviewed.

Mobile Checkbook 3.0

Mobile Checkbook 3.0 from Mobatech sells for $14.95.  This application provides basic functionality, and has the fewest features of the programs we looked at.

The transaction list doesn't contain a payee field and the fields that are displayed are minimal.


                  Accounts View

The program does support exporting of transactions via email in QIF or CSV format. And the text and icons are larger than most BlackBerry applications we've used.


                  Summary View

But, it's readily apparent that while supporting the basic features you'd want in an finance program, Mobile Checkbook is the most primitive of the three programs.

Conclusion

There's room in all these applications for improvement, especially in the usability category. Any of these will satisfy a basic need to track finances on a BlackBerry, however.

If you're looking for a Quicken or Money replacement, nonetheless, you're going to be disappointed with all of them.  They'll function as a nice complement to Quicken, but they are not advanced enough to replace it. 

It's pretty obvious that Ascendo Money and Wisespent stand out from the crowd and include the most features.  Although Wisespent is the most expensive of the bunch, it has some convenient features (recurring payments, category support) that might make it worth the extra price of admission.  Ascendo and Wisespent each have free trials available, so we suggest giving both a try before deciding.

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About the Author
Dave Mabe, the author of the O'Reilly book BlackBerry Hacks, is a largely self-taught engineer and writer who strives to create a simple, elegant solution to a complex problem. He has worked in the communications industry for eight years and has worked with BlackBerry devices for almost five.