Support & FAQ

Each app does one thing and gets out of your way. The puzzle helpers are interactive workspaces, not auto-solvers — you do the thinking, the app just gives you a tactile space to work. The Eslaforde Workout Tracker is a fast log, not a coach — it records what you actually did without nagging you about what to do next. No ads, no social feeds, no upsells inside the apps.

Yes. Simple Anagram Helper, Simple Spelling Bee Helper, and the Eslaforde Workout Tracker each include a 14-day free trial with full access to every feature; after the trial, core functionality stays available while some features require a subscription. Simple RouteBook works a little differently — it's free forever for up to three saved routes, and its Premium subscription (which unlocks unlimited routes) starts with a two-week free trial. Simple Balance Planner is different again — it is free, with no subscription and no in-app purchases at all. You can manage any subscription at any time from within each app.

Simple Anagram Helper runs on iPhone and iPad. Simple Spelling Bee Helper runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The Eslaforde Workout Tracker runs on iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac. Simple RouteBook runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Simple Balance Planner runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. All are built natively with SwiftUI for the best experience on each platform.

No. We do not collect, store, or transmit any personal data to our own servers. The puzzle helpers process everything locally on your device. The Eslaforde Workout Tracker and Simple RouteBook keep your data on your device, syncing across your own Apple devices via your iCloud account (we never see it); the Workout Tracker can optionally write completed workouts to your Apple Health database if you enable that, and RouteBook uses your location only on your device to launch directions in Apple Maps; and Simple Balance Planner keeps your ledger on your device and in your own private iCloud database, never connecting to your bank and collecting nothing. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

Open the app and tap the banknote icon in the top-left corner. On the subscription screen, tap "Restore Purchases". This will check your Apple ID for any active subscriptions and restore access.

Two, and they’re the same problem from opposite ends. Your bank tells you what you have today, not what you’ll have on the 28th once rent, insurance and the car payment have all landed. Simple Balance Planner carries the balance forward day by day, so you can see an overdraft weeks before it happens — and equally, see the stretches where far more cash is sitting in checking than needs to be there, money that could be earning something elsewhere. It manages one checking or savings account and projects its balance. It is deliberately not a budget tracker or expense categorizer.

Three steps, and the first one matters most. 1. Set your Opening Balance — the balance your account had immediately before the oldest transaction you’re about to import. 2. Import at least three months of transactions from your bank’s CSV export, leaving “Auto-create recurring rules” switched on. 3. Look over the rules it created, then let it run. Expect about ten minutes for the whole setup.

Because that’s how the app works out what actually repeats. When it reads your history it looks for payees appearing in three or more separate months and turns each into a monthly recurring rule — rent, utilities, subscriptions, salary. Import only one month and it has no way to tell a monthly bill from a one-off purchase, so you get no rules and no forward projection. Import three or more and most of your fixed costs configure themselves. More history is better still; six months is ideal.

Nearly every bank offers a transaction export, usually labelled “Download” or “Export” in your account activity, with CSV among the formats. The app reads the common bank layout directly — the one with Transaction Description, Transaction Date, Transaction Type and Transaction Amount columns — so in most cases you can import the file exactly as downloaded. It also accepts a simpler format of its own (date, description, notes, debit, credit, verified). If your bank’s export doesn’t match either, use Import / Export CSV → Export Blank Template to get a correctly formatted starter file you can paste into. Whichever you use, the first line must be the header row.

This is the one step that’s easy to get wrong. Every running balance in the app is calculated forward from the opening balance, so it needs to be the balance of your account immediately before the oldest transaction in your import — not your balance today. Get it wrong and every figure will be off by the same amount. If that happens, just correct the opening balance and the whole ledger recalculates; nothing is lost.

A stored definition that generates future occurrences without you entering them — monthly on a given day, every N weeks, or every N days. Those occurrences are projected into your balance right away, so you can see months ahead with nothing typed in. Rules can also be created by hand from the Rules button, by ticking “Repeats monthly” when adding a transaction, or from an existing transaction’s menu. You can regenerate them from your history at any time via Rules → Create rules from existing transactions.

Turn on Amount varies for that rule and it will match its payee at any amount. By default a rule matches its own specific amount, which is deliberate: it means one payee with several fixed amounts — different standing transfers, say — stays as several separate rules rather than being lumped together. Electricity and water bills are the usual candidates for “amount varies”.

A few minutes a week, and it’s the habit that keeps the forecast worth trusting. Check your account activity and do two things. First, add anything that isn’t covered by a rule — the dentist, a flight, an unusual grocery run — because those one-offs are exactly what turns a comfortable projection into an overdraft. Second, tick off the items that have cleared. The recurring bills need no work at all; they’re already projected. You’re only ever entering the exceptions.

Ticking the checkbox marks a transaction as having actually cleared your bank. For a projected recurring occurrence, verifying converts it into a real, recorded transaction. Verified rows fade to grey while anything unverified stays at full strength, so what still needs reconciling is obvious at a glance. Go To Oldest jumps to the oldest unverified row so you can pick up where you left off. You can also drag down a column of checkboxes to verify a run of them at once.

Up to a year. The calendar button in the top-right corner sets how many days ahead to project — anywhere from none at all up to 365. The same panel holds a clean-up control that permanently deletes transactions older than a date you choose, folding their total back into the opening balance. That prune is the only thing in the app that destroys data, it asks for confirmation, and it cannot be undone.

No, and that’s deliberate. It won’t categorize your spending, set envelopes, or tell you that you spent too much on coffee. There are excellent apps for all of that. This one does a single job: keep one account’s balance healthy over time, so you neither overdraw it nor leave money sitting in it doing nothing.

iPhone, iPad and Mac, built natively with SwiftUI. Everything syncs automatically across your own devices through your iCloud account — sign in with the same Apple ID and there is nothing else to set up. On iPhone the ledger is designed for landscape, since it’s a wide table of columns.

Yes, and unusually so for anything financial. The app never connects to your bank — there are no bank logins and no aggregation service such as Plaid involved. Everything is either typed by you or imported from a CSV file you chose. It is stored on your device and mirrored into your own private iCloud database, which we cannot see. There are no analytics, no ads, no third-party SDKs, and no servers of ours anywhere in the picture. You can export everything back to CSV at any time, or erase it all from inside the app.

Type your letters into the text field at the top, then tap "Start". Your letters will appear as blue, draggable tiles in the workspace. From there you can drag them into the ordered boxes above, rearrange them, or shuffle them to see new combinations.

The boxes are the ordered row at the top — drag tiles there to spell out words in sequence. The workspace is the grey area below where tiles can float freely. You can drag tiles between the two areas. Use the drag bar at the bottom to resize the workspace.

Tap any tile that's in a box to lock it in place — it turns black with a lock icon. Locked tiles won't move when you shuffle or drag other tiles. Tap again to unlock. This is useful when you're confident about some letter positions and want to experiment with the rest.

If tiles are in the workspace, Shuffle randomly rearranges those floating tiles. If all tiles are in boxes, Shuffle randomly reorders the unlocked tiles within the boxes. Locked tiles always stay put.

Fill Boxes takes all tiles currently in the workspace and places them randomly into empty boxes. It also collapses the workspace to its minimum height so you can focus on the letter sequence.

After the 14-day trial, you can still use the app but you'll be limited to 4 letters at a time. Subscribe for unlimited letters and full access to all features.

You'll see 7 hexagonal input boxes. The first box (gold) is for the required centre letter. Enter it first, then type the remaining 6 letters — the cursor advances automatically. Once all 7 are entered, your tiles appear in the workspace. Tap any box to edit a letter, and use backspace to go back.

Gold tiles represent the required centre letter. Grey tiles are the other letters. Orange tiles are selected (part of a group). Black tiles are fixed in place.

Tap a tile once to fix it — it turns black and won't move during shuffles. Tap it again to unfix. This is great for anchoring letters you're confident about while shuffling the others around them.

Drag on an empty area of the workspace to draw a selection rectangle. All tiles inside will be selected (highlighted in orange). Then drag any selected tile to move the entire group together.

Shuffle zones let you restrict where the Shuffle button rearranges tiles. Drag the left or right handle on the workspace edges to narrow the shuffle area. Tiles outside the zone won't be shuffled. Tap the reset button next to Shuffle to restore the full zone.

Yes. Tap the "+" button next to any letter in the input area to add another tile of that letter to the workspace. This is useful for words that use the same letter more than once. To remove a duplicate, double-tap it.

Tap Start Workout on the home screen. Choose Empty Workout to log exercises on the fly, or pick a saved template. The first time you open the app, you'll be asked for your preferred weight unit (kg or lb) — you can change it later in Settings.

A reusable workout plan — for example Leg Day, Push, or Upper Body. Tap Workout Templates → + to create one, then add exercises with their default sets, reps, and weight. Starting a workout from a template clones the plan into a new session that you can still edit mid-workout.

When you tap the green check to complete a set, a between-sets rest timer starts automatically and plays a chime plus haptic when it finishes. After all sets of an exercise are done, a separate between-exercises rest timer runs (default 2 minutes). You can skip or adjust either, and change defaults in Settings → Rest Time Defaults.

Install the watchOS app via your iPhone's Watch app. When you tap a template on iPhone with the watch paired, you'll be asked whether to Run On iPhone or Apple Watch. You can also start a workout directly from the watch. Set completions sync back to iPhone automatically, so the finished workout always lands in History either way.

A card that appears on your iPhone's Lock Screen while a workout is active, showing the current exercise, set, and rest timer. You can tap Complete Set right from the Lock Screen — no need to unlock the phone. Enable it under Settings → Live Activity and allow the system notification prompt the first time it asks.

Yes to Apple Health, indirectly to Strava. Enable Settings → Apple Health and each completed workout is saved as a Traditional Strength Training session in Apple Health, contributing to your Move and Exercise rings. If you have separately enabled the Apple Health → Strava sync inside the Strava app, those workouts then appear in Strava automatically. The Workout Tracker doesn't talk to Strava directly — Strava reads from Apple Health.

After the 14-day trial, the app stays usable for one template that you pick as your free choice. Other templates remain saved and editable, just not launchable. Subscribe (monthly or yearly) at any time for unlimited templates, plus Apple Watch and Live Activity support.

Yes. Exercises, templates, workouts, and history all sync across your iPhones, Apple Watch, and Macs via your iCloud account automatically. As long as you are signed in to the same Apple ID on each device, there is nothing else to configure.

Tap the + button to add a route. Give it a name that means something to you — like Dentist or Storage Unit — set a start and end point, add any stops along the way, and choose your travel mode. A couple of example routes come pre-installed so you can try one-tap launching right away.

Tap a saved route and RouteBook hands the whole thing — start, stops, and destination — to Apple Maps, which opens straight into turn-by-turn directions. No retyping addresses and no hunting through history.

Yes. Set the start point to Current Location and the route works from anywhere — handy for the drive home or a ride that begins wherever you happen to be. RouteBook uses your location only on your device to build the directions; it's never sent to us.

Each route can be set to driving, walking, cycling, or transit, and RouteBook opens Apple Maps in that mode. You can add stops along the way for multi-leg trips.

Yes — and the exact wording matters, because Siri only recognises the specific phrases the app registers. Start with Start, Run, Drive to, or Navigate, say the route by the name you saved it under, and include “Simple RouteBook” in the request. For example:

• “Hey Siri, Start Mom’s House in Simple RouteBook”
• “Hey Siri, Run my Morning Commute route in Simple RouteBook”
• “Hey Siri, Drive to Soccer Practice with Simple RouteBook”
• “Hey Siri, Navigate Airport with Simple RouteBook”

A couple of tips: don’t drop the app name, and avoid “Open” — it’s unreliable for starting directions. “Open my routes in Simple RouteBook” only opens the app to your route list, and “Open [route name]” won’t launch directions at all. You can also add any route to the Shortcuts app to run it from a widget, the Home Screen, the Action button, or an automation.

When you're looking at a place in Apple Maps or any app with a share sheet, tap Share and choose Simple RouteBook. The place is dropped straight into a new route so you can name it and save it in seconds.

You can keep up to three saved routes free, forever. Simple RouteBook Premium unlocks unlimited routes, and every new subscription starts with a two-week free trial, then continues at $0.99/month or $9.99/year. Manage or cancel any time in your Apple Account settings.

Yes. Your routes sync across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac via your iCloud account automatically. As long as you're signed in to the same Apple ID on each device, there's nothing else to set up.

Try these steps: (1) Force-close the app and reopen it. (2) Restart your device. (3) Check the App Store for updates. (4) If the issue continues, contact us at contact@eslaforde.com with your device model and iOS version.

Tap the Shuffle button to rearrange tiles to fit the new workspace size. If that doesn't help, tap "Restart" (Anagram Helper) or "Reset" (Spelling Bee Helper) to regenerate the tiles.

We'd love to hear from you! Send feature requests to contact@eslaforde.com and we'll consider them for future updates.