Bills ~ On Your Table HD Review

Early last year, PoweryBase – the same developers who brought the popular NotifyMe application to iPhone and iPad – released Bills ~ On Your Table, a slick bill-tracking application for your iPhone or iPod Touch. I commented: “style, security and simplicity make Bills one of the best applications of its kind. With free push notifications and online access, it makes it the best.” And now you can enjoy Bills on your iPad, with its just-released HD counterpart available to download from the App Store.

Bills does just about everything except pay the bills, in a beautiful, wooden interface. Passcode entry is optional. The application’s home screen shows four main categories: overdue, today, today’s pre-alert (more on this shortly) and within 30 days. Within each category, which can be shown / hidden with a tap, you’ll see all of your relevant bills, when it is due and how much it is.

Adding a new bill is an option-rich, easy task: one tap, enter the bill’s name, and then begins optional customization. Custom (along with preset) categories exist to catalogue your bills, as well as separate fields for amount and amount paid if there’s a deviation between the two (or if you’ve yet to pay). Next up, specify its due date and whether or not is a repeating occurrence: the repeat frequency is entirely customizable, and the application differentiates between fixed and variable monthly costs (like paying a loan with the same amount every month, or paying a dynamic mobile phone bill that changes slightly each time). Bills has push notifications built-in, and an optional pre-alert of a certain number of days, weeks or months before can give you advance warning to make sure you have the necessary funds in place. Finally, you can enter a note alongside the bill in case the myriad of options above didn’t cover what you needed. Online access available here allows you to add bills remotely. Nice touch.

Each bill includes a payment log, as well as an auto-pay feature - meaning it is considered paid as soon as the date is reached. I find this particularly useful for direct debits, where the payment is automatic, and leave it off for manual bills that I pay myself. The application supports 170 currencies, and bills can be entered in any of these currencies. In addition, Bills include a Statistics page that shows the total paid and not paid within each individual category and overall. Finally, everything syncs online to an SSL secure server, ensuring you’re the only one who sees your data.

I’m thoroughly impressed with Bills ~ On Your Table HD. Cataloguing bills is refreshingly simple yet advanced where it needs to be. If only paying them was as painless.

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