Financial Management 101 - The really cool website!
If any of you are like me and enjoy watching your finances day to day but are fed up with Microsoft Money or Intuit Quicken, then look no further than Wesabe! I have used Microsoft Money for years, and you know what one of the hardest things to find is (without manual intervention)? Your total monthly bills! Money and Quicken both have a concept of categories that are hierarchical, so general bills can cross multiple categories (bills: telephone, insurance: life) that are completely unrelated, so there's no way to view them on one report conveniently.
Here's where Wesabe kicks in: it uses good ol' tags. You basically tag all your transactions just like you would tag del.icio.us bookmarks (or even your blog entries on here).
Since going over to their site I have not looked back, it's the first financial application I've used where I can really tell where my money is going. It's hard to praise it enough, so I would suggest going over there, signing up, and trying it out (or check out their tour). It's free too!
The basic system works as such: create an account (type and bank), upload an OFX (or some other formats) that you downloaded from your bank directly to the configured account (important to note here is that Wesabe never keeps any login details for your banks), and you're done. Next up you start tagging your transactions, and editing the merchant details. Hereafter you start seeing other user's tips related to tags. So for example, if you tagged a transaction "credit card payment", then tips related to this start appearing with your transactions. The power truly comes in when you literally start playing around! It also remembers what merchants and tags you've set up based on those nasty bank merchant details and autofills them next time you upload.
Have fun, and let me know what you think!
Oh, nearly forgot to mention: they have an API for accessing your data, so you can write your own applications or reports against your data! Pretty neat :)