Five Online Applications to Help You Manage Your Finances
For years I used a simple spreadsheet to track my expenses and another one to track my bills. Invariably I would not get something right, which usually led to a lack of interest in continuing the spreadsheet.
Then I started using Quickbooks for my business accounting and I decided to give it a shot for our personal finances. It's a beast of a program and there is a decent learning curve, so we switched to Microsoft Money which did pretty much what we wanted and needed. Two things underwhelmed me about Money, it was a Microsoft product and the support wasn't that great and you had to upgrade every so often or risk losing some functionality.
Recently I started looking for other solutions, especially since Microsoft is no longer selling Money and will discontinue support for it at the end of next year. The result of my searching is below. All are free to use and completely based online.
Mint
This is the program that got me the most excited about using. It features automatic downloads and syncing of your account information, avoiding the need to manually enter your transactions, so there is much less chance of forgetting something. It even assigns your transactions to different spending categories based on the type of store or based on input by you, making it even more automated.
It has a budgeting feature that is simple to use and lets you know where you stand on a daily basis. Your budget info is presented in graphical form, which only serves to drive the point home. For me this is a much better way of tracking it than a spreadsheet.
Mint offers support for investment accounts as well and provides money saving advice related to your finances. It also tracks your loans, mortgages and automobiles to give you a complete picture of your finances.
The drawback to Mint, for me, is the inability to manually enter transactions, including cash spent. There is work around for keeping track of cash spent, but not cash earned and if your bank or credit cards or investment account is not supported, there is no way to input the data. Personally, I wanted to use Mint, but without the ability enter manual transactions I decided to pass.
For most people, that won't be a problem and the fact that Mint downloads everything on a daily basis means that you always have a complete and up to date picture of your finances.
Thrive
Similar to Mint, with a bit more emphasis on getting out of debt. The user forum also seems to be a bit more active. Thrive has a slightly hipper feel and they claim to be designed with the needs of twenty and thirty-somethings in mind.
Thrive offers personalized advice on your finances, and helps you plan to eliminate debt as well as save for large purchases such as a home or car. In fact, Thrive encourages you to save and provides tools for planning your future. This savings aspect is where Thrive differentiates itself from the rest.
I've got to admit the savings side of Thrive is making me think about giving them a shot in the future, but for right not they do not offer manual entry of accounts and that is a no go for me.
Budgetpulse
This is a simple program that seeks to track your spending and budgeting activities, so you won't find support for investment accounts here. If you've never used financial software before, or if you don't need or want a lot of extra features, this may be the program you are looking for.
It's basically a glorified check register, although like the others is does download your information from your bank and credit accounts. It's not fancy, but it does a good job of tracking your expenses and budget and that is all some people need.
Geezeo
Sort of like the Facebook of online personal finance applications, Geezeo is based on community. It allows you to track accounts, monitor your budget and set and track goals.
The blog is tightly integrated and the social aspect of the community is definitely the strong part. You can get and give advice from others on all aspects of your financial life and they even have a public confession area where you can come clean about any of your financial misdeeds.
Unlike the first three, you can manually upload account data so if one of your accounts isn't supported you can still use the program. It also is ad based, so you will see banks of ad on the screen.
Wesabe
The oldest of the online money management gang, Wesabe isn't a lot different from Mint or Thrive, and it may be even a little behind in some areas.
For instance, you have to tag your transactions to categorize them, so you do have to spend a little more time in that aspect than with the other four programs. On the other hand, the tags are totally customizable because there aren't any preset tags, so you are free to create exactly what you want.
The crown jewel, at least currently, of Wesabe is the ability to create cash accounts and manually enter individual transactions in them. You can also manually upload account info and they have a nifty Firefox plug-in that records the steps you take to download your account info and upload it to Wesabe. Then all you do is run the plug-in in the background and it will automatically update your account every 12 hours.
Wesabe also has an active user community and several features and tweaks have come about after suggestions made in the user forums.
While I like Mint's interface and automation the best, with Thrive a close second, I chose Wesabe because of the ability to manually create and track cash accounts and manually upload statements. They also are starting to provide automatic support for investment accounts and recently rolled out the ability to enter bank and credit card transactions as they occur to provide the most up to date balance possible. Once the transactions are downloaded, they are automatically reconciled. With the other programs, when you write a check you have to wait until it clears your bank and the info is downloaded before it shows up in your balance.
Note that many banks charge for automatic access, so that makes these programs not totally free to use.
Regardless of which one you choose, they all perform well and will go a long way in helping you handle your finances.