Month: December 2007

Web-based personal finance managers

Over the last few years I’ve made several attempts at improving my personal finance management. With the exception of the last six month, I never tracked my spendings for more than a month or so. Two main reasons for that were:

  1. I never was on a financial edge for more than a month or so.
  2. I don’t enjoy accounting all that much and I never had a tool that made it anymore pleasurable.

Each of my finance tracking periods has been guided by a different tool. I tried a few approaches from plain text and spreadsheet files, through custom written scripts, to widely used applications. None of those worked for me, except for the last one I tried – GnuCash.

I use GnuCash for about six month now. It’s a really nice application, which implemented a few ideas right. But for me two things made it – documentation (especially 3 pages of Accounting 101 shipped with the software) and the wizard which asked a few simple questions and created some accounts for me to use. I started with the simple things, and somehow they worked. Then I tried a few more advanced ones (multi-currency, transaction splits, etc), and I still loved it.

I still love GnuCash. But I am starting to feel the need for a web-based tool. As good as GnuCash is, it has a number of pitfalls for me:

  • All data is on a single computer. I need to back it up myself. I can’t access it if my laptop is not with me.
  • My mostly used tool is Firefox browser, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t use it for my accounting too.
  • Web-based services can offer additional goodies such as SMS/IM integration, email reminders, social aspects, and so on.

So, today I started looking for a replacement. My quest began at the LifeHacker post titled “Is Mint Realy For Your Money?” The article reviewed Mint.com service, while comments suggested a few alternative solutions.

Here are the services that I tried. Note – I haven’t spent much time with any one of them. Mostly those were brief sessions of register – create an account – create a few transactions – check the settings – logout.

Yodlee MoneyCenter – looks like something feature complete, but the interfaces are overly complicated and there is a certain degree of paranoia with logging in and out. While it looked like Yodlee was doing everything I needed all at once, the complexity of the interfaces and the general speed of the site made me go away without spending much time there.

Wesabe – got me impressed. Twice. Just a few minutes after I registered, I got an email from one of the co-founders – Marc Hedlund, welcoming me to the community. Marc caught my twit, followed to this blog, read a few recent entries (especially those about privacy concerns and Firefox extensions). His welcoming message provided a few extra pointers in the areas that I appeared to be interested in. Wow! I’ve seen a lot of services with personalized, fast responding support teams, but Wesabe guys (there is a blog and forum too) are a couple of levels above anything that I can remember.

The second impression on me was by Wesabe’s tagging system. Again, being a web addict I’ve seen plenty of sites and applications that use tagging. Wesabe did something really cool – they kept the simplicity of the concept while greatly extending the functionality. You can do anything with tags there. It’s very similar to the way Flickr uses tags for some internal stuff, but here tags are given to the user.

Regarding the functionality, Wesabe takes a more social approach to finance tracking and accounting. Most of the boring stuff is simplified and automated. Things which are used most often are implemented in the very straightforward way. And there is just enough of functionality to make it useful without cluttering the service interfaces and users minds.

There are a couple of limitations that prevent me from using this service right now though. None of the Cyprus banks support a straightforward export of data in any format that can be used to input accounts into Wesabe. So, I’m left with only cash-type accounts. And currently those cash-type accounts in Wesabe cannot track the account balance (no opening balance, reconciliation, etc). Marc mentioned that account balances will be added to cash accounts shortly, since many people requested them. Once this done, I’ll jump back to Wesabe with my bank statements. Really, really neat service.

ClearCheckBook.com – looked like I can work only with one currency at a time. That’s not acceptable. I use three at the moment – CYP, USD, and EUR. CYP with gradually disappear over the next few month, but I’m stuck with USD and EUR for some time to come.

Then I finally got to the service which started my quest today – Mint.com . Unfortunately, I wasn’t at all able to try it out, because it supports only United States banks and financial institutions. There was no way for me to avoid account import from one of those places where I don’t have an account.

So, as you can see from the above paragraphs, Wesabe is the one closest to my needs.  And compared to the other ones it is so much nicer that I’d rather wait for those features that I need rather than settle for something that I don’t enjoy half as much.

What other services are there?  Did I miss anything?

Undo for sending in Gmail

Google Blogoscoped runs this post speculating about an “undo” option for Gmail.  I’ve touched this topic some time ago in my “You can’t recall an email” post.  The base for that post of mine was purely technical.  What is sent is sent, and there is no way to get it back.

With another look on this issue, I see that technical side can be controlled to a certain degree.  Webmail providers (such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc), can indeed delay the outgoing message by a few seconds.  Countdowns and disappearing buttons aren’t an issue either – we have plenty of technology these days (AJAX, Flash) to implement them.  And there is a certain demand for the functionality too – this can be judged by all those browser plugins and extensions, like the one mentioned in the Blogoscoped article.

Still, I’m standing on the side of “don’t do it”.  I think it’ll add to the confusion of the interface and the complexity of the system, without too much benefits in return.  I don’t think that we should have an “undo” for everything either.   And I think that the old way of “sorry, forgot to attach this document” works pretty well and sometimes makes people to actually read through and think over again about what is that they are planning to send out.

What do you think?  Would you like to see an “undo sending” button in your email client?

It’s not only about the source

Mashable reports that source code for Movable Type is finally open sourced.  Movable Type is a blogging platform competing with WordPress, LiveJournal, and others.

These are, of course, good news for open source community.  The more open source software we have, the better.  And Movable Type is a somewhat high profile piece of software.  It used to be more popular a little while ago, and then many of its fans moved to WordPress and other alternatives.

One thing I wanted to note together with these news, is that it’s not only about open source.  Just putting up the code out there for the general public to grab and modify it is not enough.  It’s about the community too.  Someone has to lead, support, and inspire people to try, test, develop, document, and praise.  Someone has to listen and react.  This last part is one of the most difficult tasks in open source development.  And there are plenty examples to prove it (just look at most of the stuff at Freshmeat.net or SourceForge.net).

WordPress guys are terrific at driving their community.  With Six Apart manage to compete with that?  We’ll see…

Blogging with Google Docs

If, for some reason, you don’t like the editor of your blogging tool (WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc), you have a few options to consider.  Those of you hosing your own blogs, can always try a plugin or two.  WordPress, for example, has a number of plugins which either add pieces of functionality or completely replace the default editor.  Alternatively, you can try an external editor.  That is, you can use a piece of software which is not a part of your blogging platform, for writing posts.  There are Firefox plugins (ScribeFire, Xinha Here!), standalone applications (w.bloggar, Windows Live Writer, and more, and more), and web services (Performancing.com) that do this.

Today I was reminded, that one can even use Google Docs for this purpose.  Create a new document or spreadsheet, edit it all you want and then publish it straight into your blog.  That’s how easy it is.  (You’ll need to configure a few simple settings the first time you do so though).  If it sounds interesting, check this post at Blogopreneur.com fordetailed instructions.  If it sounds interesting, but you are not sure if your blogging platform is supported, check out this list of supported platforms.

Me? I am happy with WordPress built-in editor.

On blog comments

Mark Cuban asks an interesting question:

So the question is, is it worth it to allow unmoderated comments ? Or is babysitting comments just part of the job of bloggers ? Or are comments just a waste of time under all circumstances ?

Here is how I see it.

Your blog is like your house.  In your house, you have some rules.  You don’t have them written anywhere, but everybody follows them.  Like, do you take off the shoes when you come in or if you are allowed to smoke inside.  How loud can you speak and can you bring kids or animals with you.  You know your rules.

People, who are coming in for the first time, they don’t.  There are some etiquette rules, generic for everyone, that will almost always keep you on the safe side.  Like, don’t swear until somebody does it first.  Or ask for the permission to smoke.  Stuff like that. When people come to your house for the first time, they keep it on the safe side.  They observe how you and others behave.  They ask if they need something.

This  is pretty much how comments on the blog are.  When people come to the blog, they would usually read others comments before posting their own.  They start with simple, straightforward ones.  They grow slowly.  If they do something that you don’t like, you let them know.  It’s OK.  Most good people won’t need more than one correction.  They can understand and feel the atmosphere of the blog and of the discussions.

Of course, the more popular the blog gets, the more morons will come.  Inconsiderate idiots who will feel an obligation to annoy and offend the heck out of everybody else, they will post insulting comments to a few entries in the archives.  They will come back for more…

Give them a warning.  Once.  If you are in a good mood – twice.  If it’s not your day, you can skip the warning altogether.  Then just ban the troll. Filter them out. They aren’t worth your time. They aren’t worth the time of your blog’s visitors.  The sooner you’ll get rid of them, the better.  Don’t be afraid to hurt their feelings – they don’t have any anyway.

I like the way WordPress handles comments.  It gets rid of SPAM automatically.  It sends me comments from unknown users for moderation.  If I allow a comment from someone, all further comments will be automatically approved, unless I ban the user.  If I will ever be overwhelmed with moderation of comments (not likely), I always have an option to go for “only registered users are allowed to comment”…

As to the Mark’s question of the value of comments – yes, I see plenty of value in comments.  Comments is not the main reason for me blogging, but it’s a pretty important one.