Wesabe: Addictive, But Missing a Few Better-Than-Quicken Features

When I first heard rumblings about a new Web 2.0 way of tracking finances, I was really interested. I'm notoriously unorganized when it comes to banking, and find programs like Quicken to be kludgy and tedious. I've given Wesabe a try, and while it's certainly more fun than Quicken, it's got a long way to go to be really useful.

Like most 2.0 apps, Wesabe has all the usual suspects: ease of set-up, pretty interface, and tagging. The tagging comes in handy, but I'll get to that in a bit. To get started, all you have to do is download your latest and greatest statement from your bank and start tagging away.

Once you've done a page or two of tagging, you can start looking at your data. Clicking a tag in your cloud provides a neat little summary page, complete with bar charts, comparing shopping this month in that category against previous months as well as the average, and also linking up to merchants others have tagged with the same term.

Wesabe also features the usual social networking aspects of any good 2.0 site, with groups set up for those seeking specific goals, as well as tips you can read or contribute to regarding finances and goals. A good example is Wesabe's own CEO's goal of purchasing a MacBook Pro; I was able to click on his goals and see that he wanted to do something I've already done. You can then select the option of whether you share that goal or have already attained it, and if you did, how you went about doing it (saving, ways to make your dollars stretch further purchasing, etc.).

Overall, the interface is slick and the community features are nice. The biggest problems that I have are how the reporting goes. The functionality for splitting is a bit kludgy, requiring you to assign dollar amounts or percentages in the tagging. I have a lot of instances where I have to divide in three, and I'm lazy when it comes to adding in the 33.3 (repeating, of course). My biggest beef is that your tags are public NO MATTER WHAT. Obviously, it doesn't tie to identifying information, but I have kids with some unique-ish names. I really wish that I had the opportunity to set some tags to be kept out of the community cloud.

I think Wesabe has a lot of potential to be something really cool and useful for those of us who need a LOT of help when it comes to budgeting and tracking expenses. I'd love to see a way to automatically update my reports (the biggest problem I have with keeping up with my bookkeeping), and the privacy options mentioned above.