PocketSmith Sidekick

The website supports accounts setup using Google’s OAuth, but the app only accepts username & password and so is unusable if you normally login using your Google account.

The app development team at PocketSmith doesn’t deserve the mediocre reviews! They’ve kept working on this app over the years and it’s a perfect companion (or sidekick as they like to call it) to the extremely powerful and feature rich web app! It has everything you need. Keeping tabs on your budget and adding expenses on the go was never so easy, all the while benefiting from the powerful category organization that comes with PocketSmith. Great app and great service!

I think people are giving this app a hard time because they’re used to or looking for a phone app that can completely manage your finances, which is next to impossible. Yes, it’s annoyingly still missing the Split Transaction function, but the main way of using PocketSmith is through its desktop web app. As a fully featured personal finance management powerhouse, it’s the best alternative I’ve found to Quickbooks, and I’ve tried them all, including Mint and Personal Capital. What’s their secret? I mean, their apps are programmed well, so that helps. But the main reason I chose PocketSmith was that it’s the only personal finance solution out there that lets you to manually confirm each transaction as they come in from your bank. This way, it behaves much more like a business application. Coming from Quickbooks and Xero, I realized that this function is crucial. All other applications out there either automatically feed in and categorize your transactions without confirmation, which is super easy to ignore and lose track of, or there aren’t bank feeds at all and you have to manually enter everything, which is time consuming for small budgets and impossible if you have 10+ accounts you want to track. PocketSmith strikes the balance. Xero did once upon a time have a personal finance app, which they discontinued. That’s how I found PocketSmith. Xero recommended PocketSmith to its personal finance customers when it decided to focus only on business. Maybe it’s a coincidence that Xero is Australian and PocketSmith is based in New Zealand, or maybe they’re friends, but the fact is that PocketSmith is the closest solution I found to applying business accounting practices to your personal finances. Everyone else is either missing functionality or is constantly trying to sell you something. I’d much rather pay for good service.