Payments Watch

Without even touching on the social aspects of Wesabe, the basic personal finance tracking is very impressive. As a web based application, it may surprise you how easy it is to track your transactions, and in my own humble opinion, the (at times self learning) tagging mechanism makes it superior to such desktop products as Quicken.

While I have only started to explore the features and functionality of Wesabe, I have some preliminary comments on what I have experienced so far. This mostly touches on the basics of setting up accounts and organizing transactions.

What to Like

• Web Based: so it is accessible to you anywhere. It is nice to be able to access your personal finance tracking from any machine, any OS, anywhere. An off line feature would be nice though (for example, doing a little catch up on the plane).
• AJAX: there are nice AJAX (or at least AJAX-like) features that give Wesabe the richness and feel of a desktop application. For example, you can drag and drop transactions on top of one another to merge them. Some of these slick user interface features would go unknown unless someone told you about them (someone told me about the drag and drop feature).
• Tags: tagging beats traditional categorization (read: folders) any day. The fact that tagging is a self learning mechanism, you leverage all the clean up work everyone else has done when cleaning up and organizing your transactions - social finance already benefiting you in a very simple way.

Best Practices?

I know, I already said tags are something to like, however, the self learning transaction names and tags really bothered me when it came to “Transfers”. In my case, my account transfer transactions come across as generic “Transfers” in the download from my financial institution. You update one, or tag one and they all change even though the transfers are to very different destinations. I figured out pretty quickly that the transaction name should always be the Payee (in the case of a transfer - the specific destination) and that will also keep the tags specific to each type of transfer. Of course you can also use one time tags if you want them all labeled as “Transfer”. It’s still a pain when you change the first “transfer” transaction and they all change.

What Needs Improvement

• Tips can be too general: after tagging a POS purchase at Bruno’s (a grocery store) as “food” I was very excited about the “49 tips” that were now available to me. I figured, this is great! other Bruno’s shoppers have things to say about this merchant. Instead, the tips were all about grocery shopping in general including two interesting, separate tips: (1) Don’t grocery shop when you are hungry, and (2) Do grocery shop when you are hungry. Maybe I will grocery shop when I am merely a bit peckish just to be safe.
• Splitting transactions is limited: Yes you can split a $100 transaction into any number of sub components, but what about, for example, a salary deposit. The transaction value might be $1000, but what you want to show is the following split: Gross pay of $1500 and withholding of taxes amounting to $500 (which nets to the $1000 overall transaction value). I could not figure out, or find a way to do this. Let’s face it what you actually earned in this case was $1500, its just that you also incurred an expense of $500!
• Manually add or delete transactions: As far as I can tell, this cannot be done. Based on the posts to the Wesabe Groups, this feature is definitely on the request list, but not yet available. Interestingly, many people want the feature so they can hide certain transactions (one too many visits to the pub???). Wesabe always wants the account to automatically balance and hence the inability to do manual “adjustments”.
• Cannot delete accounts: ok, so you tried it out and you decide Wesabe isn’t for you, or maybe it is, but you determine after the fact that perhaps the double secret bank account your wife doesn’t know about really doesn’t belong here. I can find no way to simply delete an account from your account list.
• Transfers: If a transaction is a transfer, it would be nice if you were able to offset it with a transaction in another account in your account list.
• Privacy: Wesabe boasts about privacy and I suppose I take them at their word. However, a lot of those transaction files you download from your bank to upload into Wesabe contain your actual bank account number inside the file. I don’t see any reason why this is required, and for all I know they don’t save that information. It’s just that I don’t know.
• Help: they need help with their online help. I think they know they need help creating better help. Can you help?