BetterOnlineBanking.co.uk

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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