Congrats to the founders for building and launching a very nice-looking site.
At this point though, I'm more likely to use something like wesabe for keeping track of my spending since it understands my existing online bank accounts rather than requiring me to enter transactions by hand - that seems like a killer feature to me since my spending these days is overwhelmingly electronic.
[disclaimer: I haven't used either tool. My opinion is based only on having seen the online demos.]
This is Ashwin - one of Buxfer's founders. Glad you liked the look of the site.
We do allow you to import transactions from your bank and credit card accounts - provided they are in Quicken or Microsoft Money format. Integrating directly with banks is on the cards as well.
One of our goals (besides tracking shared expenses) is to be able to better reason about cash transactions. Our experience as students indicated we spent close to 30% of our income(!) on coke and coffee combined. To capture all these little transactions, we allow reporting expenses via text-messages. (More ways coming soon!) Ultimately the goal is to understand *all* your expenses completely at a central location.
"Ultimately the goal is to understand *all* your expenses completely at a central location."
That's an excellent goal to have. Full integration of bank and credit card accounts would definitely be important for me.
The following may be outside of the scope of your product, but I would love to have a system that knew my finances and goals so well that it could give me useful advice such as "start buying product A, which you seem to use a lot of, in bulk from store B", "use the savings you have in account X to reduce the debt you have on credit card Y", "apply for this savings account that has a higher interest rate than the one you have now", etc. Such a system would have to understand things like credit cards that are zero-percent for a given period of time and so on. It would probably also need to know my credit rating so that it could guess what credit card offers I could realistically apply for.
To make this a little more concrete, my fiancee and I have spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out how we should best combine our various debts and assets. It's been very boring to be honest - lots of comparing interest rates that seems like it could be automated.
Congrats guys. I had the same idea last summer, started to implement it and then never bothered to finish it. What you guys have looks good. Safari support would be nice though.
At this point though, I'm more likely to use something like wesabe for keeping track of my spending since it understands my existing online bank accounts rather than requiring me to enter transactions by hand - that seems like a killer feature to me since my spending these days is overwhelmingly electronic.
[disclaimer: I haven't used either tool. My opinion is based only on having seen the online demos.]