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Filed under: Finance, Web services

Buxfer: personal finance with support for iPhone, Twitter

by Todd Ritter Jan 6th 2008

Buxfer
We've written about personal finance sites like Mint and Spendview before, but Buxfer has a few interesting features that differentiate it from the others. While it offers auto-syncing of transaction information with your banks and credit cards, budgeting, and expense analysis, Buxfer also has three key characteristics:
  1. Shared Finances - Buxfer allows you to create groups and assign specific finances to those groups to monitor who owes or receives money. For example, you could create a "Cable Bill" group and assign yourself and your roommates to the group to track who has forked over the cash for the Super Deluxe Sports Package.
  2. Google Gears - By using Buxfer's Google Gears support, you can keep all of your private financial data on your own computer, instead of Buxfer's servers. The other personal finance sites store your information on their servers, thus out of your control.
  3. Mobile Access - Buxfer has a mobile phone interface and an iPhone-specific interface for accessing your account remotely. You can also use Twitter or SMS to get account balances or to be notified of low balances, large withdrawals, etc.
Due to data security concerns, many people don't want to give their financial account information to third parties. However, account aggregation services like Buxfer can potentially create better security by creating higher, more efficient data availability. Not everyone is vigilant enough to login to every specific bank and credit card website every day to check account balances and check for fraud. However, by logging into a personal finance site, you can check the balances of all of our accounts in a few seconds which may make keeping tabs on your financial well-being a bit easier.

[Via VentureBeat]

Tags: google gears, GoogleGears, iphone, mint, personal finance, PersonalFinance, twitter

Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Google, Social Software, Weekend Review

Expensr - find out where all your money goes

by Dolores Parker Jul 9th 2007


If you're just starting out and want to get a leg up on your finances, Expensr, a web based personal finance app might be for you. It is free and allows you to create budgets to track your spending and projected spending. You can upload your bank account statements in a .ofx format, or manually enter transactions as you would in your checkbook register.

A nice security feature is the fact that you upload your bank statements manually. You don't have to provide your bank username and pasword (as with some other finance products). OFX files do contain your bank account number, but not your bank username and password. Expensr does not store the OFX file after parsing it, only the transactions in it (name, date, amount).

Since Expensr is a social network, you can compare your spending against others. This means you get to see the aggregated data of the users of a particular tag. See screenshot below. The green represents the aggregated data from the tag 'woman', and the blue is data from your user account.



StatMatch is a feature where you can really go local by comparing your spending with that of your friends. If a user looking at your profile is in your friend list, and if you have StatMatch enabled (it's disabled by default), then they can match up their core stats to yours in a nice table that shows up on your profile. With this information, you can check out who got the killer deal in rent or who spends more on entertainment. Why is this important? We're not sure, but at least you can attempt to keep up with the Jones's.



This is a beta site and they are constantly adding improvements based on user feedback. Some additional features that would be helpful are:

  1. Help wiki - it would be great to be able to find answers to common questions in a help forum.
  2. Automated categories - it's a bit tiring to manually input categories, (ex. Publix, groceries) for transactions that appear frequently.
Bottom line: Expensr a good place to get started on your personal finance journey. It's easy and has some fun features to help you manage what some people find horribly routine. However, when you start filing something other than the IRS EZ forms, you will probably want to graduate to Quicken or Quickbooks to really help you categorize, sub-categorize, evade, etc.

Tags: expense tracking, ExpenseTracking, Expensr, finance, personal finance, PersonalFinance, social network, SocialNetwork, web 2.0, Web2.0

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Filed under: Finance, Macintosh, Commercial

Cha-Ching: Tag-based money management

Macby Amber Rhea Sep 29th 2006

Cha-Ching Cha-Ching is a Mac OS X (universal binary) app for managing your personal finances. It uses a tag-based approach to categorizing incoming and outgoing transactions. Thanks to iSight integration, you can include photographs of your purchases (for tax or general pack-rat purposes). And of course, like any other personal finance application, you can schedule pending transactions and manage bill payment.

Cha-Ching's web site is sleek and polished and, like many Web 2.0 sites, appears to be perpetually in beta. Or rather, in this case, the app itself is in beta. But that's good news for you, because you can currently purchase a license for $14.95 - ten dollars off the price it'll be once it hits 1.0 status.

Tags: Cha-Ching, Mac OS X, MacOsX, money, money management, MoneyManagement, personal finance, PersonalFinance, Web 2.0, Web2.0

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