The debut iOS app from the guys at Minus4°, Bills Forecast lets you quickly look forward at upcoming recurring bills, and add in expected purchases and yearly costs (like your car’s rego and insurance). The product of a year’s work from developer Toby Pattullo and designer Dean Hecker, the app looks great — it’s especially useful for getting an easy idea of how much spending or saving money you’ll have left over every month.
Both Toby and Dean are profoundly deaf. They’ve been good friends for over 20 years, meeting playing deaf basketball. Living on Phillip Island off the coast of Melbourne, they’re both very active, and have a shared interest in snowboarding — that’s where the Minus4° name comes from. Despite both having a long history in professional design and advertising agencies, they work best together, communicating in their shared first language Auslan.
Bills Forecast is the result of their brainstorming over a beer how to organise budgeting for Hecker’s two daughters and Pattullo’s newborn. According to Hecker, “We were chatting about money, and how there seem to be so many bills coming in all the time. We started looking for an app to help us out, and there was nothing out there that appealed to us. Toby mentioned building an app ourselves, and I thought ‘Hell yeah, why not!”
From initial testing, the app works really well. It’s not complicated at all — just punch in your recurring and once-off upcoming bills on a monthly basis — and syncs with iOS’s calendar to push notifications whenever something is getting close to its due date. There’s an Android version on the way, too, once the iOS launch is out of the way.
You can check out Bills Forecast on the iOS App Store, or get a quick tour on Minus4°’s website.