Ever since the iPad has been around, developers have been trying to find the perfect way to make the device more valuable for people who want to use it beyond gaming. The iPad is an almost perfect device because it is small enough to have with you where ever you go. 

The app can be a self contained office if you use the right apps and of course, in order to really accomplish that, you need to have a personal finance app in your portfolio. While there are literally dozens of different personal finance apps, one that was released last week could stand out among the crowd. 

Mint.com has long been a well respected online finance tracker. After having made an iPhone (News - Alert) app available for quite some time the company finally released their iPad app last week. While most of the iPad finance manager apps make their users enter most of the transaction data, Mint pulls the data automatically. Pair the automatic entries with the colorful graphs and massive amount of information that is available at the touch of the screen and Mint seems to have a winner.

The graphs and data are all put together to help show users where they are spending the most money and where they can trim their spending. Most people who get these kinds of apps are those who want to know where it is their money is disappearing to. 

Mint's iPad app will fill users in on this information. Aaron Forth, vice president of the Intuit (News - Alert) Group (most well known for Quicken) that owns Mint, said that, “Eating out and shopping are the two areas of discretionary expenses that people will cut back on first.”

The app works by displaying your transactions and then the user can decide what category they want those transactions to reflect. The app also includes a kind of news feed that will notify you when you have gone over budget on a certain category. 

Mint will then allow you to investigate transactions to see where you might have spent more than usual. Should Mint add the ability to pay bills through the app, it would also put it one step ahead of Pageonce, which recently added that capability to their own iPad app.