Managing your money online has become much easier with the help of services that monitor your bank accounts and other financial information. I've found five sites that do a fine job of providing information and data to help you make more informed financial decisions.
Buxfer
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Buxfer offers a simple tool for managing your money online. And since it lacks in-depth assessment into your financial health, it's great for beginners.
Buxfer allows you to link your credit card and bank accounts to the site. If they belong to a major institution like Bank of America, the site asks you if you want it to synchronize the accounts for you. If so, it will then ask you to input your bank username and password and indicate how often Buxfer should synchronize.
Where Buxfer really shines is in its simplicity. The service features easy-to-understand tabs that provide step-by-step instructions on how to add accounts, see reports, and create budgets. In fact, creating accounts and budgets takes just a few minutes to complete. That said, Buxfer's reports leave much to be desired and they generally tend to offer simple information--revenue, expenses, and balances--instead of more important data like estimates and projections. I should note that projections are available, but only in the premium version of the service.
Buxfer is simple and responsive. If you're looking for something basic, it's a great place to start.
Geezeo
If you want some extra help beyond tracking your financial information, Geezeo does a fine job. But much like Buxfer, it fails to provide extensive data to keep you exceptionally informed.
Geezeo is easy to use, which makes it appealing to beginners. After signing up for an account, users can add bank account information, as well as credit cards, loans, and investments. Geezeo will track all the changes in those accounts once added. Armed with that information, Geezeo creates a budget for you and sets goals to see how well you're managing your money. The site also generates reports to help you see where you stand financially. But much like Buxfer, those reports are too simple to offer in-depth and most importantly, actionable information.
But it's Geezeo's community that the company touts. Aside from providing financial information, Geezeo lets you connect with other users and ask them for financial advice. Users can also create groups where like-minded individuals can discuss financial goals, and for harder questions you can ask Geezeo "Experts" for help. Most of the time, those tips are generic, though.
Geezeo is a fine service if you want to connect with others during your financial planning. And since it's free, it's probably worth trying for a little while, at least.
Mint
Mint is a fine service that takes aim at Quicken Online. But unlike Quicken, it doesn't provide the kind of depth that you would expect from a full-featured money management tool.
Similar to its competitors, Mint allows you to input account and credit card information, as well as create a personal budget and manage investments. Its core function is to look at your spending habits and recommend offers that will help you save money. If you have a high-interest credit card, or you're spending too much on a bill, Mint's advertising network will find offers from partners and suggest you sign-up for the respective service. If you do, Mint gets a small portion of the revenue generated from that switch.
Mint will automatically capture financial information from more than 3,500 financial institutions, which makes it a handy tool to keep your accounts up to date. And just like its competitors, it can send alerts to your mobile phone to tell you when to pay a bill. That said, Mint requires you to give it your account information to track your financial data. Although it's a trustworthy site, I just can't bring myself to entrust that information to a small firm.
Quicken Online
Like Mint, Quicken Online is targeted at those who don't require complex financial tracking services. That said, Quicken Online will still do some heavy lifting and it does a fine job of monitoring and forecasting your financial picture.
Forecasting is Quicken Online's most compelling feature. On the service's main page, it shows what's left in your bank account, your risk of overdraft, your risk of a low balance, and the expected spending you will incur in the next 30 days. It derives that forecast from your bank accounts, investments, and other financial data. As long as all that information is accurate, Quicken will probably be right most of the time.
Quicken Online boasts a "Where am I spending?" page, which files all your spending into different categories, like groceries and electronics, to give you a full view of where your money is going. It then allows you to set goals to see if you can rein in spending.
Although Quicken Online is the most capable finance tracking software I used, it's not nearly as powerful as its desktop counterpart, and real power users probably won't find enough value to justify using it. But for the average person who has a mortgage, an investment account, and a couple bank accounts, it's worth using. Especially now that it's free.
Wesabe
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Much like Geezeo, Wesabe employs the wisdom of its community to help you monitor spending and get advice on how to pay off debt sooner, while saving more money.
Just like the competing services, Wesabe lets you drop in your bank information, then starts tracking that data. It examines how you spend your money and helps identify areas where you could tighten your belt by providing tips from its community. For example, when Wesabe recognizes when you purchase groceries, it provides you with a list of tips from other users on how to save money for your next trip to the store. It also finds ways to pay off debt sooner by looking, once again, toward the community for help.
Unfortunately, Wesabe doesn't offer much more than that. It provides basic goals and tips wherever you turn, but if you want investment advice or more capable financial monitoring it's not ideal. Wesabe is aimed more at the beginner than anyone else.
It's a little late, but I want to wrap up the Stirr event I emceed last week. As with all other Stirr gatherings I've been to, this event included four carefully chosen presenters pitching their new Web companies. These were the companies we heard from last week:
MetaWeb, makers of Freebase, had the most popular presentation, judging by the silence of the audience during the pitch and the applause meter at the end of it. The MetaWeb database platform underpins the Freebase application and is designed to be a shared repository of structured knowledge. The blogosphere loves it, since it's ambitious, really interesting, and very open. Think of it as Wikipedia with structure. For instance, Freebase knows that an entry for an airport should contain a list of airlines that use it, and if you click on an airline from the airport entry you'll automatically see other airports it serves. It sounds simple, but building a semantic web of knowledge like that has been a dream of academics for decades. MetaWeb might just do it. The MetaWeb site has an explanatory Freebase video that's so understated, you might not understand what a powerful platform Freebase is when you watch it.
Practical tidbit: When I asked MetaWeb co-founder Jamie Taylor what important real-world applications he had in mind when the company built the system, he refused (or couldn't) name one. Usually, when a platform is built without an application in mind, it's an early indicator that the product will have a short lifespan. These products may be critical successes, but without traction in the real world, they don't last. I'm not yet sure if Freebase is different, but I really like it. It could be big, and it should be.
Criteo was the only company at the Stirr event that was new to me. This company makes recommendation engines for all kinds of Web sites. An engine can show site visitors what other products or services it calculates that they will like and thus help online retailers to sell their back catalogs of content and products. The company also has a new "AutoRoll" tool, which is targeted to bloggers and automatically creates a list of blogs based on users' behavior across sites. It's an interesting idea, but for a site to appear on an AutoRoll, it's got to be part of the AutoRoll network. That's limiting, especially during the launch phase. The example shown here is a live demo. If the links don't look all that good, mind this caveat from the company: "It can take up to a few days before the links displayed on your AutoRoll are fully relevant."
Wrike is a neat little service that helps you organize group tasks. You just cc: your project-oriented e-mails to write@wrike.com, and the service adds some intelligence to the e-mail thread to keep people on top of things. I covered this company back in December, and I still like it.
Buxfer is an entry-level accounting service that launched last year as a tool to help roommates manage split bills for rent and other shared expenses. Now it's evolving into a more general-purpose cash-flow tracking package for people with simple finances. Essentially, it's a very basic Quicken-like product for young people. It doesn't have enough depth to replace Quicken for anyone halfway serious about tracking and controlling money, but it keeps getting better and can provide insight into your cash flow, which is the first step towards controlling it. The newest feature: importing your bank statements.
Finally, our apologies for Webware's earlier post about what we called YouTube's "new" Streams and Audio Mixer products. They're not new, just updated.
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