Tim February 27th, 2007

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Moneytrackin’ is an online expense calendar and planner that offers the ability to input transactions, set up recurring transactions, import data from Excel, and view reports in a few formats. I’m about as good with money as I am with women so I’m always ready to take on the task of managing my finances, but the web world has yet to offer me a one-stop solution to budgeting and finance that I can actually use without difficulty. I decided to see if Moneytrackin’ was the key to my future financial success or not.

1. One of the prominent words that stands out on the homepage is “secure” and Moneytrackin’ has rightly built their product to work under https. I almost wish that secure layer login was the default and not an extra step at the beginning, but it’s helpful that they’ve included the option here. I should also mention that although the color scheme is not the worst I’ve seen, it could use a bit of help.

2. Nothing out of the ordinary with the sign-up so I’ll spare you the details and just let you view the pretty pictures.

3. Once I’ve signed up I’m redirected back to the homepage to log in. Once doing so I finally get to the guts of Moneytrackin’, my main acccount. There are no transactions yet so it’s time to start testing that out.

4. Moneytrackin’ pops up new transactions and many other menu items within the browser, which looks nice. However, once I start using the form some issues being to crop up. The text is too small to be readable, making it difficult to follow. The date format is setup specifically for non-US standard (dd/mm/yyyy) which in and of itself is not horrible, but making the user add zeroes onto the beginning of the date is. Also, the calendar function doesn’t work at all so all dates had to be entered by hand. All in all I had 3 errors before I could finally transmit my first transaction, not good for a first impression.

5. Now that I’ve added my first transaction I get an updated look at my account and sadly I’m already in the negative (Man, I can’t ever get ahead!). One nice thing is the built in tagging, which has become a de-facto standard in web apps these days. There is also a tag cloud view and a tag monitor to the right so I have many ways of viewing where all my money is going.

6. Because of all the trouble I had with adding a transaction I’m going to attempt to upload them instead. Unfortunately here I am hit with another barrier. Moneytrackin’ only accepts CSV files, which my bank does not offer to export. I’m dissapointed that no support for Quicken or Microsoft Money files was added to this application, but it is still in beta so we can hope for good things in the future. For now I’m stuck with adding every transaction manually.

7. To save some time, Moneytrackin’ has added the ability to create recurring transactions. When I click the button I’m greeted with a page where the transactions would be listed. This is a bit confusing since common sense would tell me a popup is for adding information and the list of transactions should be in the main window. In any case I click the button to add a recurring transaction.

8. The interface for adding a recurring transaction is similar to single transactions with similiar problems (small text, calendar button not working, etc.). Another issue I found was the inability to set a recurring transaction to continue forever. I had to put an ending date in for the transaction to go through. From Moneytrackin’s blog I see that this was done on purpose because people were confused by the interface apparently, but it has me perplexed. If there are usability issues with the UI design, as a company they should fix those inteface issues, not remove features to “clear up the confusion”.

9. Moneytrackin’ has some charting features for the visual learners like me to see how we’re doing financially. Bar graphs and pie charts are available and can be configured to show a certain period of time.

10. Projects are a section of Moneytrackin’ that allows the ability to track progress towards specific goals. If you’re saving money you could apply all deposits towards that project, or if you’re looking to spend a certain amount each month on a given category you could use projects to track that spending.

11. The ability to cap spending at a certain level for different topics is another way of bringing the “control” aspect into your expenses. I can choose to restrict myself to $400/month on food and track my spending to make sure I’m on track with that.

12. Exporting an account is possible to an Excel file only at the moment. This is another area where a few more options would be nice and I’m sure as the beta develops those will come forward.

13. Moneytrackin’ also allows you to generate reports based on a given set of criteria with or without graphics and export the report to an Excel or PDF document.

Moneytrackin’ is still in a beta period and therefore rough around the edges so I don’t think it’s fair to judge them on a lack of features. However, there are many glaring issues in regards to User Interface Design and some things like the ability to import data from bank documents that simply have to be included in order for them to compete with more feature-rich web apps. Currently I did not find anything that Moneytrackin’ has that was a unique feature specific to them and I would recommend people wait for the beta period to flesh itself out and see if this company moves forward.

Averaged Scores

• Design: 8.0
  Features/Content: 8.0
  Usability: 7.0
  Accessibility: 7.0
  Overall Rating: 7.5
  

• financial , moneytrackin , review