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.
Once logged in to the main site, you click on the Online Banking link in the header. You’ll need to log in again, which Lovemoney explains as extra security. However, if you bookmark this link and go direct, you’ll only have to log in once – this shows that actually the Online Banking element is a very separate section of the site and authentication (log in) is handled separately – that’s not a problem for most people but it would be nice to see it explained more honestly.
Adding bank accounts
At the beginning you won’t have any accounts connected to the service. As far as I can see, the only way to add an account is to provide the security details for that account and allow Lovemoney’s automatic system log into your account and download the details on your behalf. This is different to services like Wesabe, for example, where you could enter transactions manually or upload OFX files if you prefer. Manual entry isn’t an option with Lovemoney as far as I can see.
The process of adding an account is very straightforward though – search for your bank and choose from the options provided. If you find your bank, a list of security details specifically for that bank will be requested. In the case of Nationwide, for example, you need a customer number, unique identifier and a 6 digit pass code.
You’ll need to be comfortable with sharing these details with Lovemoney to use the service. They reassure you that they use secure connections just like the banks (SSL security) and that the service is read-only so that even if someone was to hack your account by guessing your username and password, all that would be comprimised would be your spending habits and financial details. In theory, the only way your data could be totally at risk would be if their security systems were comprimised in some way and data was stolen from the main database. However hard this would be to actually do, it could put people off using the service. Here’s an example comment from a recent visitor of this blog: “I like Lovemoney – but I don’t like the security risk with Yodlee” (Yodlee is the underlying system that LoveMoney’s online banking uses, and others including Mint.com in the US). The comment goes on to point out that you’re licensing your passwords to LoveMoney and Yodlee, and that in the event any problems are caused that they will not be held responsible. It’s only logical that the small print for a service like this has these type of rules but uncomfortable for many.
Categories for transactions
Once your account is connected and your transactions are downloaded, Lovemoney will make an effort to automatically add categories to each transaction. There’s clearly some intelligence here, and some transactions are categorised correctly based on keywords like “cash” in the name or brand name stores – but in many cases the guesses were wrong and I’d be happier if transactions that the service isn’t sure about were left uncategorised as it’s harder to spot incorrect categories than missing ones.
On the topic of categories – these are single level and fixed. If you’re new to financial management services I expect you’ll find this a benefit as it was a regular question I heard as a member of the Wesabe forums because newcomers to the service weren’t sure about the ideal categories. However, if you’re a more advanced user you may find that the categories are too basic. I’ve already struggled, as one of the main uses I have is tracking work expenses. Here, however, there is no category for expenses so I’m unable to keep track of a running total in this area unless I ‘borrow’ one of the other categories and remember what I’m doing – not a great user experience. There’s a blog post that explains that customised categories are being considered but with no timescales offered this may be added next month or never, there’s no way of knowing.
In the analysis tab, I was disappointed to see no options to change the period of time you can view. All of the analysis seems to only show you performance in the current month. This is great for tracking budgets in real time but one of the most useful ways of tracking your monthly finances is to be able to review last month’s activity against any budgets and targets you’ve set for yourself. This is impossible with Lovemoney unless you download the transactions as a CSV and run through the information in a spreadsheet. This is a really poor experience in my opinion.
Summary and final verdict
Lovemoney’s online banking is very easy to set up and if you are just getting started you might find a single view of your accounts really useful. However, from experience of using desktop software (like Microsoft Money and Quickbooks) through to web services (like Wesabe), Lovemoney’s service has a long way to go still. The lack of options to change categories is a minor annoyance that would stop me from personally using the service, but the inability to view reports from the past – even just the last calendar month – makes it more a data collection exercise for Lovemoney than a serious financial management site.
Review of Lovemoney.com, the first in a series of personal finance website reviews. View all reviews
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the review, I am also (with great reluctance), looking for a replacement for Wesabe. The thing that put me off lovemoney most of all was in their terms and conditions “Business Sale: In the event that lovemoney.com ltd sells any business or assets to a third party, we may disclose your personal information to the prospective purchaser.”. You could argue that they are just being frank and honest with that, but to me it reads “we might sell your online banking login details”.
Hi Ian – I’m putting the finishing touches to a review of moneyStrands after it was recommended by a few Wesabeans. So far I can’t see much to fault with it – it actually outdoes Wesabe in some ways. Keep an eye on the blog tomorrow for the full review.
Thanks Phil. Money Strands is one I haven’t heard of, so I look forward to the review, and will check it out myself.
Ian, the review’s online now – http://betteronlinebanking.co.uk/moneystrands-review-personal-finance-management-website
I’ve been using Lovemoney online banking for a few weeks now; the upside is that although it’s less complex than Money I like the simplicity. The downside is that the categorisations don’t stick – although you can set a particular category to always apply to a particular transaction (e.g. ‘Charity’ for Oxfam) my experience is that next time you go in you have to do it all over again. It applies them all during the particular session but doesn’t remember them from session to session. And it’s excruciatingly slow. Reapplying a category can take up to a minute and sometimes you get a message saying it has failed. I’ll try Moneystrands and see if it’s any better.
Wow! Just tried setting up my first account with Moneystrands and it makes Lovemoney look like a racehorse! Was also confounded by a ‘Settings’ popup that refused to go away. Had to close the browser to get out 8 minutes after it had tried to get my credit card account set up.
OK that was a hasty judgement. Once I went back into it it was *much* better. And much faster than Lovemoney. Enough from me.