As announced a few weeks ago, Wesabe will be closing it’s online banking dashboard as of Saturday 31st July 2010 (that’s tomorrow at the time of writing).

Before then, you should login to the website and download your data as either CSV or XML (or both, to be sure).

Here’s how you download your data, if you haven’t done this before:

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moneyStrands Online Banking review

by Phil on July 20, 2010

Review of moneyStrands, the second in a series of personal finance website reviews. View all online banking reviews

This is a UK review of moneyStrands, a personal finance management website. The service is based in the US but during this review test it proved compatible with all the UK institutions we threw at it (HSBC, Nationwide, American Express and Alliance & Leicester) and supports British pounds as a currency. There’s also a forum containing discussion about other banks if you’d like to check before registering.

Features

moneyStrands has the basic features you’d expect from an online money management service:

  • Transactions
    Your transactions can be either automatically downloaded  or you can upload them manually (with OFX or CSV are both supported)
  • Categories
    A good range of ‘default’ categories are provided, with both main categories (eg Travel) and sub-categories (eg Auto or Train). You can also add your own sub-categories within an existing main category which is very useful and a feature that many users ask for with these services.
  • Reports
    The analysis section contains good reports to show you spending per category (with drill-down into specific categories) and with one click you can see the transactions for that category. One very useful report that is missing from other competitors is the ‘Monthly overview’ that compares Expenses and Income together to tell you if you’re saving or over-spending
  • Export
    Once your data is uploaded, you can export the data from the ‘Details’ tab, which means you’re able to limit the export by account, date range or category.

There are also some ‘bonus’ features that aren’t essential but make the experience much better day-to-day:

  • Good mobile support
    The iPhone app is excellent and a mobile version of the website works with other internet-enabled smartphones.
  • Community comparison
    A comparison facility shows you anonymous spending habits from people like you, based on the tags you provide about yourself. This information is very useful for companies that make financial products, so this explains one of the ways that moneyStrands could be offering this service to users for free. You can choose not to add this information about yourself if you prefer.

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Lovemoney.com Online Banking review

July 14, 2010

Review of Lovemoney.com, the first in a series of personal finance website reviews. View all reviews

Lovemoney.com is a financial information site mainly, and their personal finance area is an add-on to the existing brand name and community. They launched the Online Banking section of their website in November of 2009, to bring all of your [...]

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Wesabe to close personal financial management service

July 7, 2010

Looking for an alternative to Wesabe? We’re begun posting reviews of the main options. Check out the reviews so far in the Reviews section.
Wesabe has announced it is to close on 31st July 2010. The forums will be taken on by a customer and continue in some form (more on that later).
It’s sad news, as [...]

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Money Dashboard Online Banking review

July 1, 2010

Coming soon
While you are waiting…
If you are looking for a personal finance management website with UK support, check out our reviews of moneyStrands (highly recommended) and Lovemoney.com.

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New UK internet banking website opens – Money Dashboard

May 12, 2010

Good news from any of the UK users of Wesabe and other online financial management sites.
Money Dashboard.com has moved into an ‘open beta’ version today (anyone can now register).
The competition in the money management website space is sure to be good news, either as an alternative for UK users or to stimulate new ideas and [...]

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Demo: tracking a monthly budget using Wesabe downloads

January 25, 2010

This post aims to show you what’s possible with statements downloaded from Wesabe, and explain in more detail why direct OFX downloads from Nationwide were so useful.
People use Microsoft Money, Wesabe or similar money management software for a simple reason: to make better sense of their money in an increasingly confusing financial world.
The internet statements [...]

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Wesabe tip: how to use ‘tags’

December 31, 2009

One of the services that used Nationwide’s automatic downloads was Wesabe. On the Wesabe forums recently a member of the community asked about the best approach to tagging transactions. Here’s a post about how to get the best results from Wesabe tags.
Basics: What is a tag?
Each tag is a single word or string of words [...]

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Nationwide online banking boss comments about statement downloads

December 3, 2009

Nationwide’s Head of Internet Banking, Richard Serles, has broken the silence over why the service was turned off over a month ago.
Wesabe user ‘wherestom‘ received a phone call after he went to a Nationwide TalkBack (a face to face feedback session organised by the building society). Richard called personally and explained that it was actually a [...]

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Nationwide “not chasing” high street savers – you’re not kidding!

November 20, 2009

I’ve started looking into Nationwide’s news in more detail recently, since we didn’t hear about the changes to OFX support until such short notice.
Nationwide is the country’s second-largest savings provider and it has reported a drop of more than 60 per cent in underlying pre-tax profits.
In a Financial Times article today, this interesting statement by [...]

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