They focus a disappointingly large amount of their efforts on creating pie charts and bar graphs, which like a lot of information graphics are really about giving you the impression that you’re understanding data without giving you any actual useful insight into that data. Most applications, in my experience, offer rudimentary tools for this, at best. I’m not saying if you use these applications you should expect to get rich, but the real purpose of this category of software is to let you do more with what you already have - in effect, to budget your finances. To fulfill its real mission, personal finance software should result in users having more money. No one would say digital calendaring has solved that problem. Using Outlook/Exchange or Google Calendar is a significant upgrade from a paper desk calendar, but it really hasn’t changed the way we approach the management of our time, and it certainly doesn’t result in us having more time. I liken the category to digital calendaring. On the whole though, most of the personal finance applications I’ve come across are still not particularly imaginative or insightful tools, including Mint. These are things that the Wesabes and Mints of the world have done well. Moving the functionality of Quicken to the Web is progress, and adding social tagging and features and automated categorization are steps forward too. This is true for most financial software: we’re still just getting out of the gate with it, living through a surprisingly lengthy first generation of ideas - or maybe slowly starting to emerge into a second generation. They were both fine tools for helping me to balance my accounts, but they provided very little to really help me change my financial picture. Having recently left a job with a healthy salary to hobble together income from multiple smaller sources while raising a young family, personal finance software has, unsurprisingly, become much, much more critical to me, and its failures much, much more evident.įor a good decade or so I was a Quicken for Mac user, and then a few years back I started using a desktop program called IGG Software’s iBank. This is a point that’s very fresh in my mind. 2010, most of these applications don’t fulfill their true purpose. There’s still tremendous opportunity in personal finance software, mostly because, in its current state ca. This is not a case where Wesabe lost and Mint took the market, lock, stock and barrel. What’s even more interesting for me is that the last chapter has hardly been written in this category of software. This is a story that is of course full of valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and anyone trying to create a product in a competitive marketplace. Mark Hedlund, the founder of shuttered personal finance Web app Wesabe, has written a fantastic post-mortem on his experience entitled “ Why Wesabe Lost to Mint.” It offers tremendously candid insight into what they did wrong at Wesabe, what Mint did right, and the surprisingly persistent myths around failures and successes in both camps.
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