The 6 Best Browser-based Personal Finance Management Tools

Personal finance management no longer requires mountains of paper work, receipts and a calculator. Working out a budget, income, and expenditures needn’t be such a chore. It can in fact be useful to helping you cut back, see where your money is going, and how much is coming in. And now, you don’t even need to buy an expensive software package, one so often outdated by the time it has come sufficiently down in price to justify the investment.

No, now you can you can manage your personal finances and accounts from the comfort of your favourite web browser. It’s cheaper, easier, quicker, and often much more innovative than desktop based personal finance tools and software. By maintaining your accounts online you can utilise email, integrate your online banking access system, and make the whole process smarter and less stressful. So we recommend the following as the best browser-based personal finance management tools.

1. Mint

Mint is the complete money management system, and it’s probably the most popular of all the online banking apps. This online, browser-based tool allows you to manage all your financial transactions and can take control of credit cards, your banking and investment accounts, and you won’t see any of them go down a penny through use of this app — it’s free! With budget planning tools you can further control your cash flow, and get notified by email of text if there’s something that needs to get taken care of. Got an outstanding bill? It’ll email you. Balance low? You’ll get an email warning.

Importing data from multiple accounts and credit cards is simple, and the visualisations of your cash is impressive. Want to see how much your spent last month on travel? Easy. With 400,000 users, managing in excess of $12 billion in transactions, Mint claims to have saved its users $100 million. Those interested in advanced features can monitor loans, and investment accounts. Far from just being pretty graphs and spreadsheets, Mint guides you through big financial decisions like buying a car, and it can scan through you purchases and match you up with credit card deals that will give you a lower rate.

2. Wesabe

Apparently Wesabe is the Chuck Norris of finance tools. Unlike Mint, the focus is much more on the community. Since we’re on the internet, not wading through piles of paperwork, we may as well share our expertise! Members can share money saving tips and experience with use, setting up goals and find deals. It’s not just another social network, but a personal finance solution that has a social element.

Like the rest, it allows you to manage credit cards, and categorize spending. One of the best elements is that it tracks and aggregates data, anonymising transactions, and then sharing the findings with the whole community. By giving you the average cost of a particular merchant, you can see precisely, through crowd-sourcing information, what companies are charging more for particular services. Harnessing collective intelligence, and providing a killer system, Wesabe comes highly recommended. And you know that with such a vocal community, Wesabe will be innovative with it’s features, responding to customer demand.

3. Expensr

The Expensr personal finace system is an online application recently integrated with recommendation engine Strands, using a recommendation technology to produce a new product, moneyStrands. Like Wesabe, it can analyses your transactions in order to recommend products and services that you may be interested in. The application allows you to important bank account files, automatically categorising transactions, presenting you with pie charts to see where you money is going and bar graphs to that you can see how your spending has changed.

You can compare your transactions with those in similar demographics, and budget to try and save money. You could also compare your spending to that of the average young professional, and see how you match up. It’s much simpler than staring at your bank balance and wondering if it’s just you, or whether everyone else spends this much per day. Expensr makes it easy to keep track of whether you’re inside your budget. It’s simple, easy, and free.

4. Geezeo

This is another personal finance management web application with a social twist. While Geezeo has the usual accountancy features such as budgeting tools to help you reach goals and it lets you easily manage all your bank accounts, savings, loans, credit cards and investments in one central place. But the real benefit of Geezeo, apart from actually knowing the state of your current financial situation, is the community. With so many other users, you stand a good chance of getting ahead on your debt repayments or saving up for retirement. Best of all, Geezeo is free to use.

5. Rudder

Whilst most of these applications attempt to be the whole package, Rudder focuses on bills, not banking. It allows you to determine what funds you have available to spend paying your bills. It aggregates your accounts, but rather than create pretty graphs of how much you spent in the past, it focuses on the future, letting you know how much is left in your account for spending and saving. It delivers all the information to your inbox to help alert you to your balance and to any bills that need paying. Simpy input all the bills you have to pay each month when you sign up, and then you don’t have to visit a website each time, so you save time as well as money!

6. DimeTracker

Rather focusing on bills, investments, loans, or recommendations for credit cards, DimeTracker seeks to tame unruly expenditure on everyday purchases. Instead of trying to make sense of dozens of receipts when you wonder where all your money has gone, DimeTracker allows you to text your expenses, and then it creates graphs illustrating your spending totals. It allows you to create budgets and even take pictures of your expenditure so that when you wonder why your balance is so low, you can actually see what your cash has turned into! Simple.