Giving Wesabe another try
I tried out Wesabe shortly after they launched almost a year ago, I think. I was initially excited, because I thought the using tags was the perfect solution to address the problem of categorizing personal finance details to see the bigger picture.
When I tried the service the first time, I dipped my toes in by only uploading one month of statement. I realize now that was a bad choice on my part, because it really failed to show me the most powerful part of using Wesabe.
This time, I let Wesabe import everything that it could from my bank, going back as far as last year. And I spent about an hour tagging each line item, going back for maybe about a month and a half. As I was tagging, I noticed that more and more items were automatically being tagged, because Wesabe was recognizing similar transactions. This is not a new feature because I knew about it back when I tried it first, but trying it on one month worth of information just didn’t show me the power of this application. The real benefit comes when you can see the info aggregated over a year or so, using one of your tags — and being able to do so without having to tag everything for a year.
So as the image shows above, even though I only tagged few lines with “gas,” because we almost always get our gas at the same gas station, Wesabe was able to quickly compile our gas spending for the last year.
And my hope now is that each time I update my account info, I just need to tag a few additional new items, and then the rest is good to go.
I’m really hoping that this will help Lucretia and me see where our money is going, and where we can trim the fat, so to speak. That’s all I really need to be able to do — I don’t need to balance the checkbook exactly every month; I just want to be able to know where I can optimize. And in order to do that, I simply need to be able to organize each item in my statement. Tags are really the perfect way to do this. I wish my own online bank had similar features, so I don’t have to import the info into a third-party application.
Anyway Wesabe has a social networking aspect of it that lets people share tips related to certain tags and whatnot. I really didn’t care for this the first time around, and I still don’t. But it’s free to use, and so far it’s given me enough good things (like the graph above, that really made me feel good about buying a Hybrid) to make me keep trying it for another few months or so.
Hey, Minoru,
Thanks much for giving Wesabe another try. (I’m one of the co-founders.) I’m really glad you’re liking it.
You’re right that once you have your accounts “trained,” each month you’ll usually only have to edit or tag new places where you haven’t shopped (at least, where Wesabe doesn’t yet have a transaction). If you find yourself editing the same places repeatedly, that’s a bug on our side, and if you let us know, we can fix it. Once you get into it, I think you’ll see that editing new merchants is actually helpful — for instance, anything that doesn’t really belong in your account, like an unexpected fee or a fraudulent charge, will immediately jump out at you since it will appear “different than normal” even in the name.
The Tips tab is about to undergo a significant revision, and I’ll be interested to hear if you like the new version better than the current one. We’ve heard a lot of feedback about this feature over the past year, and we think it requires a big overhaul. We’ll announce the new release at blog.wesabe.com in a couple of months; if you think of it an have time, I’d love it if you let me know whether the new version works better for you. (You can email me at marc at wesabe.com.)
Thanks again and please let us know if there’s anything we can improve about the site to make your use of it easier.
Marc Hedlund, Wesabe