Not as Painful using Wesabe

If personal financial management is a necessary evil then at least let it be quick and easy. This appears to be the premise of Wesabe.com, a free web-based application providing exactly that.

Wesabe delivers personal financial eye candy via a modular dashboard interface which has that 2.0 look and feel about it – the aggregated visual approach certainly makes for more interesting inspection than a regular bank statement. A series of column graphs, pie charts and expense clouds provide a snapshot of the user's financial performance during a given period.

The input process is performed by exporting bank transactions and uploading them to Wesabe.com – don’t groan, it’s easier than you think. Wesabe supports a variety of file formats including Quicken and Microsoft Money and your own bank should support at least one of these. The only hard part is finding the Upload button in subsequent months as it only appears when you mouse over it – shown below.

The next step is to ‘tag’ transactions with a description of your choosing, for example eating out, rent, gifts and so on. The first time will be the slowest, perhaps 5-10 minutes per month since there’s no existing transaction history. Next time you arrive at this step, Wesabe will recognise similar transaction descriptions and automatically tag them for you. Handy, no?

Wesabe provides the ability to join groups and discussions on financial topics that interest you, for example creating a budget, making mortgage repayments [*snore*] and so on. Although this might be compelling for some, the most useful feature IMHO is the data visualisation aspect – the user input/return equation is favourable for those who don’t have extensive time to better understand their finances. Whilst a user can add spending goals to their profile which provide an actual vs. target comparison, this requires more input. For the mobile users amongst us, Wesabe provides an iPhone application but with more limited functionality.

Since the site is free to the consumer and free of third-party advertising, Wesabe makes money by selling its service into major institutions. Various banks use the application to help their customers better manage financial matters and it’s the sort of product we might expect to find at theage.com.au within the Business/Money section – it’s actually used by telegraph.co.uk in the same way, “powered by Wesabe”.

Wesabe uses industry-standard encryption (no more details provided than that) and, with the exception of the login page, uses the secure HTTPS protocol for the entire session. The site does aggregate and anonymously access user data but for the purpose of creating more valuable information for the user. By analysing the spending patterns of the community, Wesabe can provide comparative commentary, for example, on the average expenditure per visit or per month at a particular merchant or type of merchant. Knowledge that you spend more or less on average than your peers is potentially very useful information.

Although sites such as Wesabe, and rivals like Mint.com, have the ability to automatically obtain banking transactions on a user’s behalf, it appears we are one step removed from this being located in Australia – the alternative for now is the manual process described above.

Wesabe is easy to use and performs well the task of aggregating and visualising financial information. But if you want to know why the Wesabe name, I’m not sure. It could be Spanglish for “we know” but the site doesn’t confirm it. The team must have a sense of humour though as I found this comment within the site’s html source code:

-- Maybe if we pretend the rotting corpse of IE6 isn't shambling around moaning "BRAINNNNNNSSS" it will go away. On the other hand, maybe what we really need is a shotgun.--

Written for PC Update magazine, November Edition.

[iPhone image courtesy of Wesabe.com]

[Thanks to @paulmeller for the heads up on Wesabe]