Monday, March 23, 2009
Money time again
Every year around this time, I review some personal financial management software due to taxes being due soon. This time around, I've finally settled on buxfer as my choice for now. The google gears integration for storing ofx username and passwords is a HUGE win; I could care less about the transactions stored on their server, however, my passwords to my financial institutions is almost life or death (and taxes)! Other sites have shiny graphs of no particular use; a breakdown of spending only really matters to people (users) if spending exceeds income, hence the expense vs. income report is much more valuable. Although on the Y Combinator front, Buxfer seems to be very, very quite, I hope they can keep up the good work. Until next year... =)
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Stale Business - Metra
This has been a long standing peeve of most commuters in the Chicago land area: why is Metra such a hassle for retail consumers?
1. July 4th, only 1.5 ticket booths open
2. Tickets cannot be bought by credit card
3. There are no automated ticket booths
If the overhead of getting into this business was not so high, plus all the government subsidies, there probably is a better way to transport people on the train.
1. July 4th, only 1.5 ticket booths open
2. Tickets cannot be bought by credit card
3. There are no automated ticket booths
If the overhead of getting into this business was not so high, plus all the government subsidies, there probably is a better way to transport people on the train.
Monday, April 21, 2008
More Money Management
A quick update...
I happened to come across two more online personal money management applications. The first is https://www.moneytrackin.com/ and the other is https://www.clearcheckbook.com/ . They both have been around for awhile now, at least longer than the other apps I've tried. They both have decent UIs, and have the Expense vs. Income report I've been looking for.
ClearCheckbook.com handles imports gracefully and works very well, although the UI is the clunkiest out of all the web 2.0 money software so far. The automatic categorization feature is also not present. It also has a chatbot that you can use as an api through several IM protocols. Pretty neat, plus, they seem to be rewriting the app, again.
Moneytrackin' is another neat PFM (I'm getting lazy, personal financial management) program. It uses tags for categorization, and most interestingly, it has an api for developers. The only down side is that the imports on QIF doesn't seem to work, and OFX is nonexistant. CSV is there, so that's not a big barrier to entry.
Overall, these two apps seem to be much more mature and useful than the new kids on the techcrunch, however, it seems like these two apps lack marketing power. Hopefully, people in search of useful money tools will find this post and be directed to the useful sites. At the same time, I hope this review will give mint, expsensr, and buxfer all a goal to aim for.
I happened to come across two more online personal money management applications. The first is https://www.moneytrackin.com/ and the other is https://www.clearcheckbook.com/ . They both have been around for awhile now, at least longer than the other apps I've tried. They both have decent UIs, and have the Expense vs. Income report I've been looking for.
ClearCheckbook.com handles imports gracefully and works very well, although the UI is the clunkiest out of all the web 2.0 money software so far. The automatic categorization feature is also not present. It also has a chatbot that you can use as an api through several IM protocols. Pretty neat, plus, they seem to be rewriting the app, again.
Moneytrackin' is another neat PFM (I'm getting lazy, personal financial management) program. It uses tags for categorization, and most interestingly, it has an api for developers. The only down side is that the imports on QIF doesn't seem to work, and OFX is nonexistant. CSV is there, so that's not a big barrier to entry.
Overall, these two apps seem to be much more mature and useful than the new kids on the techcrunch, however, it seems like these two apps lack marketing power. Hopefully, people in search of useful money tools will find this post and be directed to the useful sites. At the same time, I hope this review will give mint, expsensr, and buxfer all a goal to aim for.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Web 2.0 Personal Finance Management
Instead of reading Slashdot during lunch (nothing interesting today), I wanted to see the development of personal financial software, again! To be honest, I've barely started my own application; at this rate, I might finish it in the next century.
I checked on Buxfer again, but it doesn't seem like they have made much progress. The UI's changed a bit, but aside from that, there doesn't seem to be anything useful there, although Google Gears is pretty cool.
I've also looked at several other sites, such as Mint and expensr. I had tried mint for a couple months, and expensr for about a month. Mint scares me, knowing what I know about the OFX spec. If someone were ever to obtain my account information, they could theoretically perform automated transactions using OFX. Aside from ofx integration, neither was very helpful to me. Mint is a good business idea; using it's site as an advertising outlet for financial institutions while it being beneficial to end users. However, the practicality could be questionable.(?) Both Mint and expensr show comparisons about your own spending habits to other's spending habits, however, both do a poor job analyzing the users's own spending habits.
Am I all talk and no walk? For now, yes.
I checked on Buxfer again, but it doesn't seem like they have made much progress. The UI's changed a bit, but aside from that, there doesn't seem to be anything useful there, although Google Gears is pretty cool.
I've also looked at several other sites, such as Mint and expensr. I had tried mint for a couple months, and expensr for about a month. Mint scares me, knowing what I know about the OFX spec. If someone were ever to obtain my account information, they could theoretically perform automated transactions using OFX. Aside from ofx integration, neither was very helpful to me. Mint is a good business idea; using it's site as an advertising outlet for financial institutions while it being beneficial to end users. However, the practicality could be questionable.(?) Both Mint and expensr show comparisons about your own spending habits to other's spending habits, however, both do a poor job analyzing the users's own spending habits.
Am I all talk and no walk? For now, yes.
Friday, November 02, 2007
Several orders of business
Long time no update, but let's get right to it.
For people running SQL Server Analysis Services 2005, just pay for the enterprise edition. We had originally bought standard edition and upgraded to enterprise. During the upgrade, the VB functions in MDX broke. It took us 3 hours to find that instead of replacing the standard edition files, a new folder was made (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.x\OLAP, it created a new "x" instead of upgrading the files). What happened, though, was that the upgrade process didn't copy needed DLLs over in the \bin directory. So make sure msmdvbanet.dll is in the bin directory!
Outside of work, I'm training hard for probably the last wushu tournament I will compete seriously in (getting too old!). Here is a funny (only after the fact, it hurt like a biatch!) vid of us training at Extreme
The tourney is Nov. 17... much too soon. Hopefully I'll get the chance to tape some pros there.
For people running SQL Server Analysis Services 2005, just pay for the enterprise edition. We had originally bought standard edition and upgraded to enterprise. During the upgrade, the VB functions in MDX broke. It took us 3 hours to find that instead of replacing the standard edition files, a new folder was made (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.x\OLAP, it created a new "x" instead of upgrading the files). What happened, though, was that the upgrade process didn't copy needed DLLs over in the \bin directory. So make sure msmdvbanet.dll is in the bin directory!
Outside of work, I'm training hard for probably the last wushu tournament I will compete seriously in (getting too old!). Here is a funny (only after the fact, it hurt like a biatch!) vid of us training at Extreme
The tourney is Nov. 17... much too soon. Hopefully I'll get the chance to tape some pros there.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Personal Finance Software: Take 2
A year and one month ago, I had complained about the lack of personal financial applications for Linux. After being vague and just whining, the post did receive one comment about other financial applications such as Gnucash and jgnash. Although these applications can track your finances, they are no better than using a spreadsheet. To be more specific, I think the minimum requirements for a good personal financial application should address usability through a well constructed user interface, automation like being able to synchronize electronically with your bank, and security.
So again, I took a tour of the available applications. After some research, it seems like this market has stayed relatively unchanged with Quicken and Microsoft Money leading the way in commercial software, followed by the open source ones. Web based financial applications have cropped up, such as Buxfer, a web based money tracker funded by Y Combinator.
And again, my options seem to be unchanged for something that works on a posix platform. Out of all the desktop applications, Gnucash was the only open source application available with OFX. There are some other programs that implement OFX, but are commercial, and seem to work only as well as Gnucash. As a side note, since I'm running Ubuntu, it took an extra 4 hours to install OFX support in Gnucash, and afterwards, I could not make much sense of how my accounts were organized in the actual application.
Of the web based applications, I did give them a try, and they have very nice user interfaces. However, as the comment on a previous post said, I don't feel comfortable using an online application for my finances; between my desktop and my bank, there shouldn't be a middle man as it is just another point of possible failure. Also, non of the online applications can synchronize transactions with a financial institution; they're working on it though.
So in the end, the applications that do have the conveniences and do work are not very user friendly, while the others that have nice eye candy do not provide any conveniences beyond my spreadsheet.
A question then arises; Why is it so hard to get your own financial data from your bank and other financial institutions? OFX politics and technicals. I will skip the politics of the financial institutions keeping their OFX servers secure by obsurity and/orpotential kick backs from Intuit and Microsoft to keep the barrier of entry into the personal financial software market very high , but instead talk about the OFX communications format.
I took some free time (*shock* *gasp* free time?) to try to build a quick OFX client. After downloading the XSDs from the ofx website, I used JAXB2.0 to create some Java objects for me. Then I looked at the pdf specification that describes how to construct the ofx xml. The results where that the XSD generated objects did not enforce some rules stated in the specifications. I had used JAXB before to generate objects and never had a problem with it, so it must be the XSDs. And I'm not the only one with trouble it seems... (ex:) http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/10491.aspx
So in the end, I'm left with no application that can talk to my bank and be user friendly, and it seems that rolling my own solution will take some crazy reverse engineering.
Let's do this again next year, Cheers.
So again, I took a tour of the available applications. After some research, it seems like this market has stayed relatively unchanged with Quicken and Microsoft Money leading the way in commercial software, followed by the open source ones. Web based financial applications have cropped up, such as Buxfer, a web based money tracker funded by Y Combinator.
And again, my options seem to be unchanged for something that works on a posix platform. Out of all the desktop applications, Gnucash was the only open source application available with OFX. There are some other programs that implement OFX, but are commercial, and seem to work only as well as Gnucash. As a side note, since I'm running Ubuntu, it took an extra 4 hours to install OFX support in Gnucash, and afterwards, I could not make much sense of how my accounts were organized in the actual application.
Of the web based applications, I did give them a try, and they have very nice user interfaces. However, as the comment on a previous post said, I don't feel comfortable using an online application for my finances; between my desktop and my bank, there shouldn't be a middle man as it is just another point of possible failure. Also, non of the online applications can synchronize transactions with a financial institution; they're working on it though.
So in the end, the applications that do have the conveniences and do work are not very user friendly, while the others that have nice eye candy do not provide any conveniences beyond my spreadsheet.
A question then arises; Why is it so hard to get your own financial data from your bank and other financial institutions? OFX politics and technicals. I will skip the politics of the financial institutions keeping their OFX servers secure by obsurity and/or
I took some free time (*shock* *gasp* free time?) to try to build a quick OFX client. After downloading the XSDs from the ofx website, I used JAXB2.0 to create some Java objects for me. Then I looked at the pdf specification that describes how to construct the ofx xml. The results where that the XSD generated objects did not enforce some rules stated in the specifications. I had used JAXB before to generate objects and never had a problem with it, so it must be the XSDs. And I'm not the only one with trouble it seems... (ex:) http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/10491.aspx
So in the end, I'm left with no application that can talk to my bank and be user friendly, and it seems that rolling my own solution will take some crazy reverse engineering.
Let's do this again next year, Cheers.
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