Review: Bills ~ On Your Table
by Robb Lewis
February 20, 2010
Overview
Do you struggle to keep track of all your outgoing bills? Well wouldn't it be great if you could get push notifications for upcoming and overdue bills? That's where Bills ~ On Your Table comes in. B ~ OYT lets you input as many or as few bills as you need to. You can set a reminder date with repeating options, and choose a category from the predetermined ones - or even create your own. Badge icons tell you how many overdue bills you have, and the home screen gives you an overview of all the bills you have put in. But does it really help you remember what bills need paying? Lets find out...Features
- Support for 170 currencies - Built in calendar - Payment log - Push Notifications - Passcode lock - 9 notification sounds to choose from - Automatic syncing to web access account - Custom categories and alert frequency When you first open B ~ OYT, you will be asked to create an account. Email address, password, confirm password, sorted. Once that's out the way you can get to the good stuff. There are four sections on the home screen of Bills; Overdue, Today, Today's Pre-Alert and Within 30 Days. The overdue section will show, as you've probably guessed, overdue bills.
The number of overdue bills is also indicated by a badge on the B ~ OYT icon when you are on your iPhone home screen. This is great as a quick reference to see if you have anything overdue.
As with Overdue, Today is pretty self explanatory. Any bills with today's date as the due date will be shown here. The next session requires a little more explanation. When you create a new bill, which I will do in a moment, you will be asked for a pre-alert time. This is the amount of time before the due date that you will be notified. This can be a day, a week, a month or even a year.
The final section shows any bills that will become due within the next 30 days. All of these sections can be hidden, or expanded, depending on what sections you think are most important.
Now onto adding a new bill. Pressing the '+' symbol on the home screen will bring up the new bill screen. Set a title for the bill, a category, a due date and how often the bill repeats, if at all. You can select how long the bill goes on for, for example, if you are paying off a loan for 18 months.
You can set the pre-alert to anything you want by selecting day, week, month or year then choosing the exact amount of time you want to be notified before the bill is due. So for example, you can set a bill to repeat every month and to be notified four days before the bill is due. The final thing you can do when adding a bill, is attach notes to the bill, as well as see a log of how many time the bill has been paid.
B ~ OYT also has a slew of other features that make it far better than any other 
bill-tracking app. Firstly, the push notifications. After a week or so of testing, all push notifications arrived within a couple of minutes of when they were scheduled to.
You can also test if push is working by going into settings and selecting 'PUSH TEST' at the top. B ~ OYT also has a built-in calendar similar in style to the iPhone's own, showing which days have bills due. Synchronisation between bills and the iPhone calendar would be nice, but isn't available at this time.
You can also see an overview of which bills you have in each category by selecting 'categories' from the home screen. From here categories can be edited or deleted and new ones can be added. The last feature I really like about B ~ OYT is the web access. By going to the B ~ OYT's website, you can login with the account you created, see all your bills as well and edit, delete and add more.
