Of course once we’d decided on the basics of all this allowance/chores/responsibilities stuff, we had to figure out how to track it all. We wanted flexibility and ease and though I love charts, they didn’t seem to quite cut it. I didn’t want to be printing out new charts every week and making changes to them constantly. And they hardly serve when we’re away from the house! But then I did what I always do. I went back to my nerd roots. There’s got to be an app for that.
I looked on both of my mobile devices and the best selection of apps by far was (unfortunately :P) for my iPhone. I downloaded over 10 and in the end, I had two serious contenders: iAllowance and Tykoon. Tykoon was nice because it’s backed by a cloud and has the ability to have kid accounts and parent accounts, meaning that I could set everything up on my parent account and then Tabby could see her balances and chores on her iPod without messing with my settings. But it really fell apart in customization. The accounts that are set up are stock. You can’t rename them. And it also seemed to focus too much on obtaining material things … your kids can “spot” things and take photos of them with their iPhones and there are spaces for wishlists. It is still in Beta and hopefully it will improve because it has pretty good potential. It also had the advantage that you could setup chores for both kids simultaneously. But in the end, iAllowance worked best for the way we want to manage things.
Above is the home screen. You can click on each child to see their current data or you can click the > on the right to do setup for each kid. And it shows their current totals. iAllowance has three currencies (perfect for us!): time, money and stars.
The setup, while not quick, was pretty easy. You setup each kid and then you setup their allowances, accounts, chores and rewards. These can be copied from existing so you only have to make one or two changes and that speeds it up quite a bit.
Allowances are regular additions (or theoretically deductions) to the accounts that happen automatically on a regular basis. Chores are regular additions (though again, could theoretically be deductions) to the accounts that happen when you check them off daily on another screen. Rewards are deductions (could theoretically also be additions) that you can check off whenever they happen. You can also make transactions completely separate from any of these to account for anything else (kid buys a toy, -$15 from spending $$) that comes along.
Once you’ve set things up, you can view the kids’ data. At the top is a right-left slider and you can use that to access their account totals, check off rewards and chores, and see the nitty-gritty transactions of each account.
When you check off chores each day, the transaction is automatically made. As you can see, you can have a chore that is done once weekly or any combination of the days of the week. You can also have a chore that is done multiple times/day.
The transaction is also made when you dole out a reward and the kids can see how close they are to this or that reward with the status bars.
And you can review transaction history on every account.
The app is excellent overall but it has a bit of room for improvement. The #1 thing I would like to see is some cloud features for it. A cloud database with website interface would be very nice not only for syncing between the devices (it currently uses a rather buggy Dropbox solution) but also for my husband who does not have an iPhone (and doesn’t want one). It would also be nice to be able to have child/parent accounts so that a kid with a device could look up his balance and check off chores himself (subject to approval from parents). Further, something where you could print the current list of chores would also be quite useful, especially while we’re still getting the hang of this.
The system itself, not quite a week old, is going pretty well. It has taken a bit of time to get the hang of it, but it isn’t time consuming. Getting in the routine of it is the big deal but I’m determined to make it stick. The kids are both really into it which is helping. So far it’s worked best to get an update from Matt after he drops them off and then do one right before they go to bed. I think we’ll probably have to make some adjustments here and there, but so far, so good.