Ok, so I’ve been using Yodlee’s Moneycenter for a long time now and I love it. It keeps track of literally everything from credit cards to banks to my time warner account to my frequent flyer miles, if I have an account it tracks it automatically. I’ve seen a bunch of posts over the past few months extolling a new web2.0 site called Wesabe. Not thinking of my personal finance in particular as a theme for social networking I was intrigued and decided to check it out.

So, to set the stage let’s say that Yodlee and Wesabe, while concerned broadly about the same topic have very different scopes. Yodlee tries to cover everything for you, a place where you can monitor a ton of your own financial information. Wesabe focuses only on your bank and credit card accounts, but adds in a community aspect and some web2.0 style organizational structure.

Wesabe allows you to tag all your line items (expenses, deposits, etc..) with arbitrary tags, so you can easily view groups of transactions. Within any tag you can set up spending targets and it will show you how close or far to that goal you are for the month at any given point. And you can set up goals which, more or less, seem to be groups of tags. As you tag things, you can make the tag apply to all transactions from the same place or else you can set it to be a one time tag - that’s quite useful since many expenses will be the same all the time.

The social aspect is sprinkled throughout. Next to many transactions is a link to tips on saving money that are relevant to that vendor. So, if you bought some stuff at Trader Joe’s (a grocery store) you’ll see a list of tips (sometimes things like “don’t grocery shop hungry” other times things like “good deal on olives here.”). The tips are suggested by other members of the community and there’s a potential discussion around each one. The tips are easy to check out and you can add your own tips. There are also discussion groups, a huge variety of them. All manner of things like more savings tips to wesabe information to entrepreneurship.

Unfortunately Wesabe isn’t that big on telling you how to do stuff. I couldn’t find any documentation anywhere, so trying to figure out what a Goal did was trying. The relationship between tags and goals was strange to me initially, and definitely not intuitive. Now that I pieced it together, it does make sense, but a simple guide that explained it wouldn’t have hurt. There’s some strange nav problems where sometimes you leave your account if you try to hard to look for help and have to hit back to get back into it.

Yodlee on the other hand does not try to be anything social at all. It doesn’t provide any tips or anything else but access to your account information. One hang up many people have with Yodlee is the fact that you have to provide them with all the login information to any online accounts you want it to track - this is a lot of trust to put into one institution. Wesabe gets around that by giving you a desktop application that you use to store that information which then pulls your account data and sends it to wesabe, so your names and passwords are never in Wesabe’s posession. This is a killer feature for the company.

But what they lose with that is the ability to pull data from a huge variety of sources. Yodlee can pull data from all over the place and are constantly adding in new account possibilities. Another thing that I love about Yodlee is that it pulls bills for you - so you know when a new bill is online, how much it is for and when it is due. They offer a BillPay service that you can set up so that you can even pay your bills from the website - but I don’t personally do that. For me that is huge - to be able to go to one place and see when everything needs to be paid has saved my skin many a time. Yodlee also automatically updates their information daily and you can update all of the or particular accounts at will as well. It will send you email alerts when transactions are more than a threshold you specify or if credit cards approach a limit you specify, useful as warnings as well as a potential fraud detector.

Yodlee also keeps your history around forever and shows you a nice chart for each account or account group that shows it’s ebbs and flows monthly over time. It can show you at a glance transactions from all your accounts at once or else just a single account, it allows you to categorize your transactions as well as define rules for automatically categorizing them. Many of the come categorized based on the vendor type, so if the vendor is registered as a restaurant, it automatically puts that in food expenses.

Yodlee’s business, actually, is maintaining their moneycenter software for other banking clients - so places like Citibank and HSBC offer their clients access to private moneycenter applications. However, Yodlee also maintains their own version publically so they can make changes and modifications to it without having to go through their clients.

Both sites are free services but have very different focuses. If you are a bad spender and need well defined goals and community support to help you, Wesabe is a great solution. But if you’re just looking for a place that will keep track of all your accounts, banking, investment, frequent flyer, bills (like phone, utilities and cable) Yodlee is a one stop shop. Functionally it offers so much more than Wesabe does and as a history of expenses it is awesome. You can export your data to excel friendly downloads.

I think Wesabe is an interesting start and I hope it grows to become much more featureful than it currently is. As it stands I don’t find anything particularly compelling about it. For financial wisdom, I can frequent FatWallet.com and learn about all the ways to be frugal there. For me Yodlee is nearly perfect - if you don’t mind giving up your passwords, I’d definitely recommend you check them out.

UPDATE: Also check out my review of mint.com as it compares with yodlee and wesabe.

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May 3rd, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: finance · review · web2.0