MoneyStrands, the online banking dashboard,  turned off it’s automatic updates feature over the last week. They have been very vague about timescales, but I’ve learned through their official Twitter channel that it’s going to be offline for months, and there’s very little explanation why.

'Atenttion' - even the notice has a typo

It’s generally quite a suspicious situation, as this information was quickly provided by Twitter but MoneyStrands have avoided all mention of timeframes on their online FAQ.

MoneyStrands response on Twitter

It’s made even more strange by the fact that it comes so quickly after a redesign and launch of commercial products. I can’t see anyone having enough loyalty to stick with the service for such an extended break in the core service. Finally, there’s no way to manually upload a file to an ‘automatic’ account, so I’d need to set up all of my accounts and settings again. No chance.

Automatic updates are a core benefit of these online services, as you can easily aggregate all your accounts into one place.

Last year, I reviewed a number of online banking aggregators (MoneyStrands review, Lovemoney review) that would handle automatic updates from UK accounts, after Wesabe went down. Of all the sites I reviewed, MoneyStrands came out on top for it’s UK support and great interface. Such a shame that this has now been struck down by a technical problem and even worse customer service in its handling.

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:

We’re looking forward to an update on Wesabe’s open source idea, but in the mean time I’ve moved to moneyStrands, and there are lots of other suggestions in the Wesabe groups.

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.

Registration

To register for the service, you will need to enter some standard information like a username, email and password. The registration process is noticeably simpler than the one we saw in our Lovemoney.com review, as the personal information (work, home ownership, etc) is optional with moneyStrands and can be added after registration is complete.

moneyStrands is another internet banking facility that uses Yodlee in the background. This means that the terms and conditions of the service contain similar requirements to the ones described in our Lovemoney review, such as the granting of a licence to access the services and a limited power of attorney. To their credit, moneyStrands makes it explicit that you are not granting any rights to transfer or alter your bank accounts at all – here’s what they say: “For the avoidance of doubt, the power of attorney granted under these terms does NOT include the power to withdraw or transfer funds from, in, or out of your accounts.” This wasn’t covered in the lovemoney terms and conditions and it gives a little extra reassurance. Anyone concerned about providing all their financial login details should read the ‘Accounts’ section below and take advantage of the manual accounts facility.

Adding accounts

Once you’re registered click the ‘Accounts’ tab then choose to ‘Add new account’. You can either download the data automatically by providing your bank’s login details, or choose a manual account and upload the digital statement data yourself. This is quite an advanced feature, as not all services offer a manual option. It’s not always been available, so the team must be listening to user requests which is also a good sign.

It picked up all of the UK financial providers we asked it to, and all in all the process was what you’d expect – enter a keyword for the provider and pick from a range of options, such as the UK version of an international bank.

A note for UK users: the default currency is US Dollars ($) so you’ll need to go to the Settings page (cog icon in the top right corner) and choose British pounds (£) to display your accounts correctly.

UK users should change their preferred currency on the settings page

For anyone worried about trusting a third-party website with their banking details, this service enables a reassuring middle ground with ‘manual’ accounts. I  chose to add my current account as an Automatic account (containing a relatively small amount of available cash) and my savings at a different bank as a manual account. This protects the bulk of your money in the unlikely event of a security breach, but gives you the benefit of seeing all the information together.

Reports

There are only a handful of reports available, but the ones that are here are the ones you really need. It’s very hard to show screenshots of these without disclosing personal information, so here’s an example from the moneyStrands signup pages:

Sample of the reports provided by moneyStrands

On the Analysis tab, you can see overall Expenses or Income over a range of timeframes (this month, last month, last 3 months, this year, etc). View them either as a bar chart to compare month-to-month changes, or as a pie chart. You can then click onto a main category in the chart to drill down into the sub-categories you’ve selected and even view these filtered transactions with a single click. It’s very useful for spotting transactions in the wrong category or when you’re spending is getting out of hand.

The second and, in my opinion most useful, report section is the Balance of Flows. This chart will either show you a month-by-month tracker of how much you’re either saving or overspening. This overall view of your monthly spending is really useful and it’s very useful for setting monthly budgets in future, as you can see exactly how much you need to reduce your spending by.

One other option you have in the Analysis reports and also in the transactions Details tab is a checkbox by each account to view just one or more accounts. Very helpful if you want to see how a savings account or work expenses account might be running month to month.

You can also choose to hide individual transactions from the Analysis view, which I find very useful. For example, I’ve hidden all inter-account transactions so that they don’t appear as income or expenses in the monthly chart.

Summary and verdict

There’s so much available in the service I don’t have time to cover it all in this review – and I mean this in a good way. As well as the features covered so far, there’s also:

• Budgeting section to set a monthly target for each category and track progress,
• Dashboard page that you can customise from all the widgets available. These are all extras you can find out about in your own time,
• Alerts that you can setup to notify you if a certain bank account drops below an amount you choose, or if a large transaction is made from one of your accounts, and a
• ‘Just for me’ recommendations page for financial products (which seemed very US centric)

moneyStrands is definitely worth registering for and setting up your own accounts. I’d recommend you take advantage of the ability to use both automatic and manual accounts as an extra security precaution, but this is up to you of course. Right now this blog thinks moneyStrands is the best personal finance management service for UK users.

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 internet banking accounts together under a single website login.

Registration

To access the service, you’ll need to register for the site much like you would any website, other than their demands for passwords are stricter than average (I had to use both uppercase letters, lowercase letters and numbers). When it’s your private financial information it’s reassuring to know they place these demands although possibly inconvenient at first if you’re not used to ’strong’ passwords.

To register, you’ll need to provide a list of details about you – this is very useful for Lovemoney as it can connect the financial profile of people in different jobs, incomes, etc. Very useful for them as a business and it’s a free service so no room for discussion – you’ll need to give up these details to use the service. If you’d rather keep these details private I guess you could always make up the answers, but that’s your call.

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.

It’s sad news, as Wesabe was one of the few financial management websites to support non-US users – UK and Canada in particular. This blog was first created in response to Nationwide bank ending of support for Wesabe (via their Microsoft Money data feed).

The reason given by Wesabe is (ironically) lack of financial support. Its recent attempts to create a platform for banks to outsource their Internet banking functions can’t have raised the money Wesabe hoped for, and there didn’t appear to be any other income outside of investment partners.

The Wesabe forum will live on through a customer, but in recent months it became unmanaged so major changes will be needed if this area isn’t soon to become a dead end for people seeking financial help.

Wesabe offered a great service with forward-thinking features that benefitted the customer first. We’d like to say thanks to Marc and the team for everything they achieved. This blog will continue with a broader goal of looking into all financial management services and offering tips to consumers.

I was personally a Wesabe customer so this closure will trigger a renewed search for the best financial management service for UK consumers. Recent launches from Lovemoney and Money Dashboard are first on the list, but leave a comment if you know of others.

EDIT: Comments left here and on Wesabe Group have suggested Money Streams and Yodlee as other alternatives

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.

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 energy in this area.

I’ve just registered and will post up some news once I’ve got something to share.

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 most banks provide are very basic. This is either because banks don’t think people want / need anything else or (the more cynical suspicion) they prefer to make it difficult to track bad spending habits.

Software like Money and Wesabe exist to fill this gap. One of the main benefits are ‘tags’ or categories to group money into sensible ways and improve budgeting. Once data is tagged in Wesabe, graphs show these transactions grouped together over time and you can check how your budget is going. This is perfect for an Envelope budget approach, without actually using cash and real envelopes.

Wesabe’s ‘tag’ graphs are a massive improvement over my bank’s own website (a single view across my cards and accounts) but one thing I wanted was a monthly breakdown on a single page. To Wesabe’s credit they let you download your data (and promise to do this forever). Thanks to this commitment, it’s possible to create your own.

Here’s how I used Wesabe’s data to create the missing report:

1. You start with the very basic information contained in a CSV from Nationwide internet banking (excluding the balance, which I’ve removed for privacy).

2. Next, convert the CSV to OFX then upload to Wesabe along with your other accounts.

3. Tag your transactions to add some meaning. Once you’re done, below is an example of the information you can download from Wesabe in a CSV file (XML is even more detailed but let’s keep it simple):

4. Finally, I used software to analyse the data and make a webpage with the new report on.

Here’s the end result:

Example of a report based on Wesabe data

This report uses dummy transactions and dates inspired by real trends so don’t get hung up on the numbers. Hopefully it shows there’s a much more useful way of looking at your monthly spending.

Creating the report took a few hours but in the long run it saves lots of time. With a few routine clicks of my mouse I’ve got an actionable understanding of my finances. I can see where I’ve overspent, and understand how much is left over for savings.

Open services that share data through APIs are growing in popularity. Services like the UK’s data.gov.uk and US’s data.gov open data projects and social network favourite Twitter provide APIs to let people access their data and do interesting, useful things with it.

UK banks aren’t keeping up with this trend, and in some cases like Nationwide they’re actually moving backwards.

Ironically, Nationwide removed the service at the most difficult financial time the world has seen for decades and made it harder for their customers to manage during this tough time.

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 that help you describe and manage each transactions. Once you have used a tag more than once, you will be able to see ‘zoom in’ to see only the transactions that have that tag assigned. Click a tag name in the Wesabe dashboard to see spending patterns for just that tag.

Tags and keywords became popular in blogs, photo sharing and bookmarking sites to make it easier to find content. For example, good tags for a photo would be: names of people in the photo, dominant colours, the time of year, the type of camera used. I’ve found it’s better to take a simpler approach to tags in Wesabe, and I’ll explain why in the post below.

Examples of Wesabe tags

Basic examples of tags provided by Wesabe are ‘cash’, ‘holiday’, ‘food’ or ‘movies’. They are a great way of adding extra context to your monthly budget, and extra helpful when you track lots of different accounts, from one bank or many – this way you can see true spending patterns across all of your money rather than the information provided by your online banking provider.

Suggested tags to get started

My popular tags came from using a desktop program called Microsoft Money. In Money, you had a predefined set of primary and secondary categories to get you started. For example, the primary tag of ‘food’ is helpful to see how much you spend on groceries and eating out, but by using a secondary tag of ‘home’ or ‘work’ will help you see where the bulk of your spending happens and where you could make savings.

Here are a few common tags that apply to 99% of my monthly spending:

• bank
• bills
• cash
• clothing
• entertainment
• exercise
• expenses
• food
• gift
• health
• hobbies
• holiday
• home
• InterAccTransfer*
• special-occasion
• technology
• travel
• wages
• work

* Wesabe has a built-in ‘transfer’ setting but I keep these separate with a tag

Advice on choosing tags

There are no rules – choose any tag you want. If you use them like me to track spending over weeks and months, they’re most useful when you use them more than once. In that sense, it doesn’t matter what you choose so long as it’s memorable and consistent.

Why single tags are better than multi-dimensional tags

Money can only be spent once. I find it’s hard to manage money at all, never mind managing it in more than one way.

If you to manage your money to a budget or see trends emerge in your spending patters, I’ve found it’s important to start with a common set a strucutred approach to tags.

Uploading statements then tagging your transactions is already one extra time commitment. Keep it simple and stick to a single tag system. It will be easier to balance your finances that way.

I’ll find some time later this week to describe a more advanced approach: Two-tier tagging

Comments please!

Reply in a comment if you do things differently, or if you’ve got anything to say on the subject of tagging.

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 Microsoft platform that was providing the updates. This shows why they needed Microsoft support, and also the lack of skills in the Nationwide team to continue to manage the service:

The reason they keep harping on about Microsoft Money (even though we do not use it) is that it’s Microsoft’s software they are using to provide the ‘background banking’ service.

This software has had no support from microsoft for several years and supporting it internally was costing a fortune and it never worked properly anyway (missing accounts etc.)

The impact is currently that neither OFX downloads or automatic updates are anywhere on the horizon. wherestom added that “a new e-banking platform is in the works but won’t see the light of day till the middle of 2011″.

So – what’s next?

1. Could Wesabe swoop in for Nationwide to replace the defunct MS Money service with their Springboard platform?
2. Or do we need to move en-masse to another bank?
3. If you’re leaving Nationwide for another bank, which one are you leaving for?