How do you track your finances?

Posted October 29, 2007

I have longed for a solid, convenient, and mobile way of tracking my finances for a long time. When it comes to finances, right now I keep receipts, check my online banking daily, and keep track of things in my head. While I haven’t overdrafted my account in a long time I still feel as though my finances are scattered and need to be more tightly tracked.

I need a solution that I can track on my computer, on my Pocket PC, quickly and easily. I need to keep track of my account balance, bills, and pending transactions. With these needs a Web 2.0 solution makes sense but I have yet to find one that has everything I need. Mint accesses your bank account information for you and displays your bills, spending, and balances all in one spot but has no mobile version. Moneytrackin’ has a great service which allows you to track your account balances and provides a mobile version, but won’t let you track bills (it does let you enter transactions to be made periodically, for example a bill which is set up to auto-withdrawal, but the service enters it into your account on the day you specify instead of reminding you about it ahead of time).

One desktop financial app I like is MS Money Essentials, but it cannot export files (to be transferred to a mobile device for instance). I have tried MS Money Plus and it’s too involved, way more than I need. Quicken is nice, but the GUI is nasty looking and some tasks are way more complicated than they need to be.

How do you track your money?

3 Comments so far

  1. eliot on October 29th, 2007

    they use to make a pocket quicken for pdas. i use a bil paying service now and have a budget in excel.

  2. John Engstrom on October 29th, 2007

    Hi Eliot,

    I’ve built my own solution that I think beats both Money and Quicken in terms of the core functionality. I also think it does some really cool stuff that neither do well. I just received an iPod touch and it’s definitely usable on that device. I also have a streamlined mobile version that specifically designed for entering spending when you’re on the go. Let me know if you want in of the private beta.

  3. Nick Barnard on October 29th, 2007

    I use Budget - I’m not quite sure if it meets your needs, but I like it for its reasonably direct interface and nice rolling up of the “Big Picture”

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