Is there an Mvelopes iPhone App? That seems to be the question that has caused a lot of buzz around the Mvelopes forums in past months.

Ficinity (makers of Mvleopes) responded and are in the process of developing an Mvelopes iPhone app as well as an app for the Android. When will it be available? I haven’t seen any announcements regarding timeline and can’t seem to find any recent updates on the website.

However, I wait with eager anticipation because an Mvelopes iPhone app would help bring Mvelopes to a new level in money management software. After all, people manage their money on the go today and many are doing so from iPhones or Androids with rich functionality.

All this being said, Mvelopes Personal does have a mobile version of the software that I’ve been using for several months now. It’s not an iPhone app, but it is accessible via Safari on the iPhone (and other Mobile devices) at m.mvelopes.com and it does a good job.

Mvelopes Mobile Set Up

To get started, you simply need to login into your Mvelopes account and choose the Mobile icon within Mvleopes. A window will pop up that allows you to set up your Mvelopes Mobile view. You can select which envelopes you want to display, create a payee list (to choose from when creating manual transactions) and set the screen size (it differs based on how large your mobile device screen is).

Mvelopes Mobile Features

Mvelopes mobile has a number of features that make manging your money via your iPhone or other mobile devices quite easy. You can create or assign manual transactions to envelopes, assign or split transactions downloaded from your financial institution, check envelope account balance and create envelope or account transfers (after you’ve performed the transfer with your financial institution).

How Do I use Mvelopes Mobile?

If you’re an Mvelopes Personal user like me, you understand there is a lot more functionality within the application like creating envelopes and managing your spending plan. But, as a user, I still find Mvelopes Mobile quite useful.

My wife and I both have iPhones and have the Mvelopes Mobile website saved to our favorites in Safari. I’m the family CFO, so it’s my responsibility to assign transactions to envelopes as they are downloaded from our financial institution. Once assigned, we can easily see how much money is remaining in each of our envelopes via Mvelopes Mobile.

I’ve selected the most common envelopes in our spending plan for our Mobile version. We can log in from our iPhones easily to see how much money is remaining for food, gas, clothing, entertainment, etc. As the family CFO, I also assign transactions on the go so I don’t have to do so from my computer later in the day. It all works out quite well, in my opinion.

What’s Next?

If I receive any updated news about the Mvelopes iPhone or Android app, I’ll be sure to let you know. I’m excited about this future development and hope to start using it soon. In the meantime, I’m quite comfortable continuing to use the mobile version of Mvelopes.

4 Features of Mvelopes

1. Envelopes Budgeting

Envelopes budgeting has been around a long time. In short, the premise is to use cash envelopes to manage your money. You simply create an envelope for every major budget category and deposit cash into it according to your written plan. You use the cash to make purchases and when the cash is gone you’re done spending.

Mvelopes has taken a manual process as described above and automated it. With Mvelopes you set up electronic envelopes to manage your cash flow. As expenses are recorded, the amount is deducted from the virtual envelope giving you a quick way to see the balance of each budget category. As you watch the balances while you spend, you’re much less likely to overspend and in some cases save money. offers some features that put it in the top tier. They seem to do it right by offering some classic styles of budgeting on an electronic platform.

2. Transfer Money Between Budget Envelopes

As with a cash envelope, you might have money left over in a budget category and need to spend more in another area. With Mvelopes you can electronically transfer money from one envelope to another keeping your budget in balance. For example, let’s say you have under spent $30 on groceries for the month. You could easily allocate the extra money to cover the need for more gasoline, or to savings.

3. Allocate Income for Budget envelopes

With cash envelopes you withdrawal money from the bank after your paycheck is deposited and insert the proper amount into each of your physical envelopes. The equivalent is provided with Mvelopes by allowing you to set up funding plans which enable you to determine how you want to allocate money for your paychecks. Once you receive your deposit transaction into Mvelopes you choose your funding plan which deposits your money into each virtual envelope.

4. Drag and Drop Features of Mvelopes

Once transactions are downloaded from your financial institution, you can drag and drop them to an expense envelope, or to your income cash pool for funding. This feature saves quite a bit of time for assigning transactions to their respective budget category or envelope.

There are many features of Mvelopes, but these four features seem to provide a lot of help in enhancing personal money management.

Personally, I don’t think I could live without using personal finance software. Some people choose to reconcile their checkbooks and maintain a budget manually; there is nothing wrong with this. Software can provide efficiency and exactness that is sometimes hard to get with a manual approach, but at the end of the day people should choose the approach that works best for them.

Do you have any experience working with Mvelopes?  If so let us know about your favorite features in the comments.

Mvelopes has a 14 day free trial.  I recommend signing up for the free trial to test it out for your needs.

This is an article I originally posted at Christian Personal Finance.