wheresitworking?

Quicken Online Loses Out to Mint

Welcome to wheresitworking?  For my first post I’ll be reflecting on my recent experiences pursuing an onine personal finance management (PFM) solution.  I’ve been a Quicken user since about 1999, using it entirely on my home PCs.  Recently, I decided I wanted to transfer the process to my MacBook.  I downloaded Quicken for Mac thinking it would be a fairly smooth transition.  It wasn’t, I won’t go into the details completely, but the gist of it is you can’t import your data directly from PC to Mac in Quicken.  You have to go through a few hoops and the data ends up messy.

Plan B, which is more inline with my recent obsession with putting all my data online, was to look for an online solution.  I’m on my 5th notebook in 30 months; that’s a lot of installing programs and pushing data around.  I am becoming a big advocate of just using online solutions for everything.  So, Quicken Online was the logical first choice.  I was hoping that I’d be able to just import my Quicken files from my PC, and I’d be up and running with Quicken online.  Not the case, which didn’t surprise me after the Quicken on the Mac experience.  After spending a bit of time tinkering with Quicken online, I decided the interface wasn’t great, and it was time to defect.  Think about this; I have used Quicken for 9 years, and I had relatively little problems with it, I would have considered myself an advocate.  Now, they’ve lost me as a customer.  More time and research should have been put into Quicken online.

Where to next?  Here are (most of)  the players in the online PFM space: Thrive, Mint, Buxfer, Geezeo, Wesabe, and Moneytrackin‘.  I created accounts on Thrive, Mint, Buxfer and Geezeo – I didn’t try out Wesabe because I couldn’t find any great reviews, and this review led me to believe it wasn’t worth trying.  MoneyTrackin’ has no automatic interaction with institutions – so you have to manually enter all of your transactions.  Thrive is young and obviously isn’t there yet – they didn’t have support for some of my accounts from major financial institutions.

The finals: Mint vs. Buxfer vs. Geezeo.  Geezeo has some good reviews, and overall I was impressed.  But it was inferior to Mint for several reasons.  One big reason was I found the interface somewhat constricting; the ads take up a lot of real estate, making the register narrow.  Also, the choices for account classification are also not as extensive as Mint’s; Geezeo offers only a handful of options, Mint offers upwards of 30.  I can classify an account as a 529 College Savings account in Mint; it’s just “Other Assets” in Geezeo.

Buxfer is probably a good choice for those using Buxfer already for their other services, but it has a ways to go as a PFM tool.  Mostly it was it’s inability to automatically pull data from institutions that turned me off.  It requires that you manually teach it to pull export files from your accounts, using a Firefox plugin.  Not a very smooth or easy-to-use system.  I did like the Buxfer interface, it utilizes the most space making it easy to edit transactions in your registers.  I am guessing they will get their relationships with these institutions dialed in, making the user experience much better.

Mint won me out.  Mint is flush with VC money, and it looks like they have spent a decent amount of it on creating a fantastic user experience.  Adding and editing accounts is easy.  Editing transactions is smooth, and it does a great job of automatically classifying your imported expenses.  The Overview page does a great job of displaying alerts, quotes for your stocks, and a summary of your debts and assets.  One thing it doesn’t do, at least I haven’t learned how to do this yet, is allow you to add a physical asset, like your home.  Geezeo tied into Zillow and tracked my home’s value as part of my net worth.  It’s much less fun to look at your net worth with your mortgage as a liability, and no asset to offset it!  According to their VP of Product, it’s coming.

That’s where I ended up.  We’ll see how I feel about this in a couple of months, when I’ve had a chance to work with the program in greater detail.  I’d love to hear others thoughts and experiences with this though.

Tags: Buxfer, Geezeo, Mint, Moneytrackin', personal finance mangment, Quicken