Between a number of different credit cards, savings accounts, checking accounts, investment accounts, rewards accounts, and PayPal, keeping track of all of one’s different financial accounts can be quite the hassle. To get a complete picture of where you’re at, you’ll need to login to each one individually which is time consuming and quite the pain.
A company called Yodlee has come up with a solution that allows users to keep track of all of their accounts at one place and automatically login into them if they would like. Primarily, they sell their “Money Center” product to banks for integration with their online banking systems, but they also allow customers to make use of a version of the Money Center software for free.
One of Yodlee’s most useful features is that you get a complete look of where you’re standing on one page. It will show you a list of your accounts and then provide a list of account balances with a net worth total at the bottom. It will also track your net worth over time to make sure that your finances are heading in a positive direction. It will show you which accounts have improved from last months and which accounts have decreased in value.
Yodlee’s Money Center web-application also features a spending report application which will look at your electronic transactions across your different accounts and provide an easy to read report of where your money is going. If you’re not quite sure what exactly you’re spending your paycheck on, the tool provided will give you a pretty good idea. The categorization mechanism isn’t always perfect though, I’ve found that a lot of my spending has been coming up as ‘uncategorized’, and I’ve had to manually tell Yodlee what the money was spent for.
Money Center also released a feature called ‘financial calendar’. It allows you to look at any of your accounts for a given month, and then it will show a calendar for that month, and any transactions that happened on each date. It might not be the most practical way to look at one’s checking account, but it does provide an interesting perspective.
There are some inherent security risks in using this software. One company will have all of your account information and if anyone were ever able to get into your Yodlee account, they would likely be able to get into just about everything else as well. Yodlee does do a pretty good job by using security questions and site images to make sure that you are who you say you are when you login, but it’s something to consider.
You can check it out at http://moneycenter.yodlee.com/
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