by Jeffery Battersby, Macworld.com  

Track cash in the cloud

Just a few years ago if someone mentioned “cloud” in conjunction with “finances” they were no doubt talking about some kind of crisis, but that’s no longer the case as several Web-based financial management applications have popped up on the web that can collect and store your personal financial data. This is how I track my finances; for me, the beauty of the cloud is obvious--it’s centralized, accessible from anywhere, it requires little in the way of maintenance, and in almost every case the setup process for each new account is incredibly easy. There are three major players we like in the Web-based financial space, Wesabe.com, Buxfer.com, and the 200-pound gorilla in the room, Mint.com.

Wesabe

Wesabe (free) is a community-based money management tool. No, that doesn’t mean that you get so share other people’s money to fulfill your financial goals, but what it does mean is that as you begin to manage your money, work on your debt, and save for your children’s college education, you can also share your woes with, get encouragement from, and learn from the mistakes and victories of others.

Wesabe account setup is simple for some accounts and a hassle for others; for some banks and credit card companies all you need is that financial institution’s Web login. Once you enter the Web accounts, Wesabe automatically downloads any new transactions every time you login. But for most of the banks I use, I need to download a monthly data file from my bank and upload it to Wesabe. If Wesabe doesn’t currently support your institution, this could be a hassle.

After your transactions are loaded, you can tag each one with multiple categories and tell Wesabe to do the same to all future transactions. These tags are then used to help you track spending and income and set savings and budget goals. You can also create or join groups with other Wesabe users where you can learn how to get out of debt, increase your savings, or just commiserate. One other point to keep in mind about Wesabe: it doesn’t have a mobile interface for when you log on using your smartphone. Not a deal killer, but pretty tough when you want to check your accounts from the road.

Buxfer

While each Buxfer account type (free [Basic], $2.79 per month [Plus], $3.79 per month [Pro]) offers more options than the previous plan,(Plus accounts offer unlimited accounts, budgets, and reminders; Pro accounts add Balance Projections) there’s little that you can do with any of the pay accounts than you can’t get done with a free Basic account.

Buxfer was able to automatically download transactions from my credit card accounts and one of my bank accounts, leaving downloading and importing statements from other institutions as my only alternative. There is a workaround for this: you can use Firefox and the the Firebux plugin (available at the Buxfer Website) to record the process you use to sign in and download your latest transactions from your bank. Unfortunately, I was never able to get this tool to work properly.

In terms of features, Buxfer offers some pretty basic fare when it comes to tagging your transactions and reporting on your purchases, but it was able to automatically recognize many of the transactions that I imported and Buxfer offers a slick Web-based iPhone interface that let me log into and view my account information on my phone.

Mint

Mint (free) is my personal finance favorite, a site that I’ve been using since early 2008 and one that handles almost all of my accounts with ease and accuracy. Unlike either of the other two Web-based applications, Mint is capable of importing data from all but one of my bank accounts, using my regular Web login for each account to import Mint data. The first time you import banking information, Mint attempts to put those transactions in their proper categories, but I’ve found that Mint’s attempts at auto-categorization were initially either too generic or not quite what I wanted them to be. Fortunately this is easily addressed. You can edit your first few transactions to reflect the categories you want them to fall into and your transactions will reflect the proper category the next time they’re imported.

Mint offers a number of budgeting and planning tools, graphs, information on spending trends, even offering you options for saving money on credit cards, IRAs, insurance, and brokerage accounts. These money saving offers are essentially ads for new cards or accounts, so caveat emptor, but it is a good way to see how you might save money transferring your credit card account balances to a lower rate card.

Mint does have one downside, at least in my experience. Like both of the other Websites and even some of the desktop financial applications, Mint can’t directly connect to one of my credit union accounts. In most cases, I can resolve this problem by manually downloading my transactions on a monthly basis, and then importing them into one of the applications. Unfortunately, Mint offers nothing in the way of automatic imports, so none of the income or expenses from this account can be tracked using Mint. Even so, Mint is the best financial management application I’ve used.

Next: Manage money on the iPhone