Finances | Review Bunker

In the past few months, I’ve been trying to be more strict with my money management. The most pressing reason is we’ve just bought a house, but I also would like to know in more detail where, and when my money is spent, and what it is spent on. After spending a few minutes researching online budget management tools, I came across MoneyTrackin.com. This online service was recommended as a new, accessible, free, and easy way to track your budget, so I signed up.

After a few weeks of use, I have decided that I don’t like MoneyTrackin.com enough to continue using it. For a tool like this to be useful, it has to be really easy to use, enough so that I am motivated to input my daily transactions, and track my finances. MoneyTrackin.com isn’t hard to use, it’s just not as easy as I would like. In today’s age of new fancy widgets and AJAX server updates, moneytrackin’ seems a bit outdated. The ‘add transaction’ interface seems clunky and time consuming - even the ‘quick insert’ doesn’t seem quick enough (although, they’ve recently added a clickable calendar in the ‘quick insert’ dialog that speeds things up a bit).

In order to properly categorize transactions, moneytrackin has a modern tag feature, where you can tag your transactions with any relevant keywords. Unfortunately, they delimit tags with spaces, not commas, meaning that you can only use single word tags. I would much rather have comma delimited tags, which would allow me to use more than one word for my tags, such as “123 Main St” for my household bills. I tried a compromise, by using plus signs, or no spaces for my keywords, but it still bothers me.

MoneyTrackin.com has a few good features that make it almost worth keeping. Their reports/charts/tagclouds give you many great ways to display and visualize your data. Also, they have a unique “tips” feature, where users are encouraged to post their tips for saving money, in an attempt to build a community where users help eachother with finances. Unfortunately, there are either not enough users signed up for moneytrackin’, or no one is sharing tips. There are currently only a total of 24 tips available in english, from all users. Out of those 24, none are “local” tips for me.

So, for now, I won’t be continuing my use of MoneyTrackin’s services. If they make some upgrades and improvements, I may be back, but until then, I will continue to search for the lazy man’s ideal money management solution.

MoneyTrackin’ Online Accounting at MoneyTrackin.com: