SuccessMuslim.com Financial Tools Review – Part 1 – Buxfer.com

By SuccessMuslim

With the Success of our article series – “SuccessMuslim.com Productivity Tools review” – we are starting a new series – on reviewing and introducing to you finance tools and websites available to take charge of our financial life.

Today I like to review a nice money management website : “Buxfer.com”

What is Buxfer.com ?

Buxfer is a personal finance management software – with currently tracking $2.5 billion dollars in over 16.94 million transactions (As of today – 04/15/2011). Similar to its competitors Mint.com, geemzeo.com, YNAB – it allows you to bring all your personal finance information together in one place. I recently signed up for the service and here is my review.

Goal : To be able to monitor all of our online accounts, including IOU’s – regardless of what institution they’re held at. We should be able to track balances, monitor big transactions, and be able check it from anywhere.

Buxfer.com Features

1. Automatically download transactions from your bank or credit card (mixed results for us)
2. Analyze and visualize where you spend your money (basic but effective)
3. Control your spending with budgets and mobile alerts (Great tool for controlling spending)
4. Track shared expenses and I-O-Us (e.g., rent, groceries with room-mates) (one of the strong suits of the software)
5. Transfer money online and settle your debts (we didn’t use this)
6. Access specialized iPhone / Blackberry interfaces “on-the-go” from your mobile device (I don’t have one of these fancy phones!)
7. Buxfer’s spending reports let you dig into your past spending, drill down into different categories and analyze spending trends.
8. To plan future spending, you can create budgets, bill reminders and forecast your monthly cashflow.

Again, the features are basic, but effective. You can break down your income and expenses into the different categories, find out where your biggest expense categories are, and find places to cut down. If you find that your tags aren’t quite specific enough to allow this, you can modify your tags or add new ones at any time.

Website Design

The first thing you notice when you come to Buxfer.com is their simple no frills design. The page has a white background, with links to accounts on the left, and tabs to different sections at the top. When you first login you’ll be taken to a summary page that lists some spending trends, account balances, and quick links to other sections of your account.

Again, the design is pretty basic and clean, keeping the focus on what you’re doing here, balancing your checkbook. If you know what the gmail interface feels like, this is pretty similar to that interface. Plain and simple.

Good:

1. Simple to setup new accounts.
2. Simple Gmail-like design: No overpowering colors or over the top Web 2.0 schemes.
3. Simple yet effective tabs structure: They keep it simple, but the options they give you are very useful.
4. Useful graphs and charts: Charts that give you good, useful information.
5. Balance and spending alerts: keeps you up to date on what money is coming in, or out.
6. Budgets: Ability to track and stay within a budget in one or multiple areas.
7. Ability to track spending for groups: track what you owe, or what others owe you. Also gives you ways to pay them.

Scope of Improvement:

1. Problems in setting up accounts with some banks
2. limited options for investment and savings accounts: No simple way to setup 401k accounts or some other more advance savings options
3. Clunky importing of data: Some data imports re-imported the same data as new transactions.

Summary:

So far in the three weeks I’ve been using Buxfer.com I have enjoyed using the software.

Mint.com (we will review it in our next article) gives you more detailed analysis on our spending, and how we can save money. While buxfer helps to manage IOU’s better and track the expenses in manual way (also connecting to your bank – though this is yet to be working with all banks)

I will recommend Buxfer.com to those of you out there who are able to get the software up and running with your accounts. Once you’ve got things loaded, and your accounts download automatically, it should be much more of a joy to use.

Their Website : buxfer.com

SuccessMuslim.com review rating : 3.8/5

Tags: buxfer review, money management islam

Category: Money Mastery