moneyStrands Online Banking review

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.

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:

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.

Tagged as: internet banking, moneystrands