wesabe: web 2.0 financial money management community site

[free4now]

Saw this today on boingboing:

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/17...unity_mon.html

What does Wesabe do?
Wesabe is a community of people who share our experiences with our money so we can help each other make better financial decisions. We do this by aggregating and analyzing our community members' personal financial data, and showing tips — recommendations to get the most from our money. These tips and recommendations come from the collective wisdom of our entire community. When one of us figures out how to make a great decision, we all learn.

I'm a bit hesitant to entrust a one-day-old site with my financial details... just curious if anyone is trying this out.

I will say I like the idea... what I really want is a web-based tool that can categorize and track expenditures across multiple accounts, and that can understand transfers between accounts so it doesn't miscategorize them as expenditures or deposits. Wouldn't it be cool if it could automatically spit out a complete spending report (the kind of thing my credit card company can do) for all accounts, and even quantify cash expenditures and other "leaks". I don't necessarily think wesabe has this ability yet but it looks like it could in the future.

[sgeeeee]

I use Microsoft Money to track expenditures and investments. I think a lot of folks on this board use Quicken for tracking all expenditures and investments. Money and Quicken both provide internet links to update stock and bond prices. They also provide features to load directly into several income tax packages.

Prior to getting a copy of Money on a new laptop several years ago, I used a Excel spreadsheets for the same purpose. Of course, you still have to enter some of the data.

[free4now]

Yep, it's that entering data part that turns me off. I'm hoping someday there will be a product that will automate most of that mundane data entry which is now required to really track how much money you spend. The product would need enough intelligence (and a few heuristic rules) so that it could treat say a paypal ebay payment as an expenditure, but not treat a transfer between accounts as an expenditure.

[sgeeeee]

Originally Posted by free4now

Yep, it's that entering data part that turns me off. I'm hoping someday there will be a product that will automate most of that mundane data entry which is now required to really track how much money you spend. The product would need enough intelligence (and a few heuristic rules) so that it could treat say a paypal ebay payment as an expenditure, but not treat a transfer between accounts as an expenditure.

Money has no problem dealing with transfers between accounts correctly while treating actual payments as expenditures. Transfers are a specific transaction type in the program. It also allows you to directly download your account transactions over the internet into the program (for many banks, mutual fund companies and brokerages). Not all account holders provide account information over the internet, so you might have to enter some data. Also, clearly when you spend cash, you will have to track that spending yourself.

I typically update my account and spending once a week. It takes me about 10 minutes.

[free4now]

But Money and Quicken still require you to manually flag transfers yourself, right? Or has that been improved? I stopped using Quicken years ago.

[Mr._johngalt]

Back of a (used) envelope and a no. 2 pencil.

JG

[sgeeeee]

Originally Posted by free4now

But Money and Quicken still require you to manually flag transfers yourself, right? Or has that been improved? I stopped using Quicken years ago.

I don't know about Quicken, but Money has a pull down menu for transaction type just below the payee box. You indicate in that box that it is a transfer to another listed account and the transaction shows up in both accounts. If you are doing direct internet downloads of your transactions, Money won't pick up the transfer between accounts by itself. You do have to go in and manually indicate the transfer. Until you get financial institutions to standardize on internet accounting procedures and cooperate with each other, I can't imagine how that would change.