You may have already heard...

http://www.wesabe.com

I used to be a Quicken guy, for tracking, categorizing and budgeting, until I found Wesabe. It supports automatic uploading of transactions, tagging transactions, setting up 'sending targets' to help you budget, etc. Plus, there a whole social spin on it and you'll see money saving tips from other users for specific places that you spent your money.

It took me a couple weeks to get 'working' for me and my personal fincance system, but once I got it setup, I will never go back to a Quicken-ish app.

Just thought this crowd should know about it!

I've been curious about wesabe. I guess I've been cautious to store my data online. There's the privacy bit and maybe feeling locked into a service. On the other hand I really hate Quicken on the mac, which is what I'm using now.

Yep, I switched to Wesabe once we got rid of the family PC and went all Mac in my house. Quicken on Mac is horrible, and there's not many other apps out there that can hook up dircetly to your bank, so you don't have to manually enter and edit the transactions.

Anyway, give it a try. If you have any questions, feel free to post them here, or send an email to the Wesabe guys.. the level of help/support they offer, for being a free web app, is unprecendent. Heck, they even publish the CEO's number and hours that he will be available each day to talk.

Thanks for mentioning Wesabe. I'm one of the founders, and while I haven't had a lot of time to hang out here, I'd like to. I'm a big fan of J.D.'s and the GRS site.

If you have any ideas or concerns about Wesabe, please feel free to drop me a line -- marc at wesabe dot com. I'll also watch this thread.

@benbr, you're definitely right that privacy is a big issue. I wrote up a post about some of the approaches we're taking to protect our users' privacy here:

http://blog.wesabe.com/index.php/2006/1 ... of-rights/

Check it out if you're interested.

Thanks again.

Wow. Thanks. I'll look into it, and post here about my experience.

I set up a Wesabe account last year and was really impressed by it. I haven't used it much lately, though, since at the time it wasn't really far enough along in terms of features to be a replacement for Quicken for me. Plus all my historical data in Quicken is key, of course.

The social elements are very cool, including the ability to tag transactions, enter in the "smart name" once, and have all that data remembered for the next time - and to learn from the community.

Marc and his team are great, and definitely listen to input. In fact, one of my earlier suggestions on the uploader was to allow column header sorting for the Account / Upload Type / Last Upload columns, and I just upgraded to the latest version, and am pleased to see that in there.

Ever try making a suggestion to Intuit? You certainly won't have the same luck.

Same kind of thing here... I spoke to Marc a couple weeks ago about how the "Goals" were being used as a forum, so they needed to build out a real forum to enhance the community and allow the Goals tab to be used for what it what meant for.

Two weeks later, done.

Kudos to those guys.

I am always extremely reluctant to use a web-based system where my data is stored online. This includes email (still use POP email to download locally) or pictures (no Flickr for me, thanks). This is especially true for financial data.

The privacy issue is not the greatest concern for me. There are two larger issues that prevent me from using such services:
1. Backup/archival of data. First, I need a way of backing up the data. Secondly, I need a way of restoring the data. Even if the site gives me some way of backup, there remains the issue of "what happens if the site shuts down?" If the site shuts down, can I still get at my data without their site running?
2. Version/feature control. When using an online service, the service provider has full control over the version/feature upgrades. This means that one day you can wake up and the entire interface is changed, just because the developers thought it would be an "improvement". With applications that run on my own desktop, I control if and when I make the upgrade, as well as which version to upgrade to.

squished