I just finished playing around with Expensr.com’s demo.  Its nice, pretty quick on a broadband connection and feels a little bit more like an accounting package than the Wesabe project I checked out recently.  The charts use a Flash component called Fusion Charts which should be a pretty flexible library to do nice looking presentations of your money as the site matures.  I didn’t care for the way that I had to edit transactions - there were two or three steps involved and if I had to manage transactions with that level of complexity each time I’d give up - but this is a beta so we’ll give the developers some more time to modify things and get them running smoother and faster.

Adding transactions is a snap as the interface allows you to add transactions straight from the accounts page.  One usability complaint that I have is that to edit the transactions I had to check the transaction and then choose ‘edit’ from a drop down menu.  I know that there is value in hiding excessive UI elements, but editing is a core ability along with deleting the transaction (though any good financial manager isn’t going to be deleting transactions all too often).

I believe that at present, because its a beta, Expensr.com is free - however, down the road I would expect them to charge money for accounts to cover server & development costs (this is the interwebs, of course there’ll be money involved for a site about money).  Of course Google could buy them and merge the tool into Google Finance and it could remain free as well

As with all online tools you’ll want to be careful that security measures are taken and that you don’t compromise your personal financial information.

The final Shake it or Leave it Score is four out of seven stars, but we’ll see how things shape up!

• No related posts.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Shake It or Leave It. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.