Mint.com is the premiere web-based money management solution available Tuesday. The site pulls transaction information from your various financial accounts and presents the data in a beautiful, easily digestible format. CEO Aaron Patzer boasts that 50 percent of Mint's users have used the service to stick to a budget for the first time in their lives. Hoping to raise that number even more, its latest update, available now, focuses on making it easier for users to control their spending with advanced budgeting tools.
While Mint already had some budgeting features before the new update, it was mostly simplistic and offered little in the way of customization options. Features found in this update include the ability to set up and manage specific budgets for categories of purchases, monitor the overall effects of budget changes, budget for specific expenses (such as taxes), and track all of these budgets in real time. Users are now also able to distinguish between personal and business accounts to help separate their associated expenses. Finally, in typical Mint fashion, it has added a great looking graph visualization of your net income, broken down by month.
With this update, Mint is also pushing its users to transfer their dormant 401k accounts in to rollover IRAs through its "Ways to Save" feature, claiming that the action will result in an additional $65,000 in savings (on average) when retirement rolls around. While Mint's intent with Ways to Save appears to be genuine, be sure to properly evaluate and investigate these offers before signing up. Mint's main revenue stream comes from affiliate fees garnered from its users signing up for these offers.
These new features are certainly a welcome addition to Mint's already strong offering. Bringing responsible money management to users is an admirable goal, especially in this economy. Mint's new budgeting features should help to show even more people the way.
At first glance, the web app provides a simplistic view of things. Features included are looking at who owes you, who you owe, vendors, employees, and bank accounts. Despite the initially simplistic look, as you drill down, you uncover a whole new level of detail.
Even though this seems to be a killer app for referring to your financial information, I have to point out some points where they have missed the mark. First off, a standalone app, available through the App Store would have been nice for the iPhone, but it's not completely necessary. The largest oversight here is not being able to edit or add data. In my opinion, this would be one of the primary usage scenarios for this app. That said, this is version one of this app and we may see this sort of functionality being added at some point down the line.
If you are already a Quickbooks Online user, these new web interfaces for Blackberry and iPhone are nice perks. I'm not sure that the introduction of these apps would be the deciding factor in jumping to Quickbooks Online, but it might help the decision.
You can try it out for yourself, before signing up by going to https://accounting.quickbooks.com/m and tapping "Demo."
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