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My Financial Life is Online
April 13, 2008
Wesabe - A Great Find!
As an entrepreneur, Uncle Sam takes an awful lot of my hard-earned income. Therefore, I take every deduction possible, which means keeping track of every penny I spend throughout the year.
In the past, I was a Quicken user. I had it hooked up to my online banking. I would categorize all my expenses in there when I’d download my banking data. Then, at the end of the year, I could pretty quickly generate a report with all my expense categories.
Quicken had a bunch of hiccups a few years ago and it paid all my memorized transactions twice. That’s when I stop using it for bill pay. I did login periodically and download my transactions so I could categorize them for my tax stuff.
I attempted to that this year. I assumed I could just log in and download a year’s worth of transactions. To my dismay, I found out that my bank and Quicken aren’t supporting my version any more. I was only able to get a small subset of the transactions. Arg! And, to add insult to injury, my bank keeps only about 6 months of online transactions available for download. Double Arg!
So, I started looking around online for some other solutions. I found this site called Wesabe and it’s really making my financial life easier.
Wesabe describes itself as “a community of real people dealing with real money issues.” People use it to get control over their spending, or make budgets, or talk about their credit card debt. I don’t care about any of that. I just want to track my expenses! And I want it to be secure, secret and private! Oh, and by the way, it’s FREE!
They spend a lot of time talking about security on their site. So I thought I would give it a go. What it has are these uploader tools. You basically set up the accounts you want to track, and then, it automatically uploads the data to your Wesabe account. In Wesabe, you can tag everything, and it learns over time. So, if you have a transaction with Kroger, you can tag it as “groceries”, and the next time it sees it, it will remember. Or, you can tag something with a “one-time” tag, which is good for that transaction only. Or, you can apply multiple tags.
It took me a few tries to get everything working and uploaded correctly. I also set up a cash account to track things I pay cash for. I had to download a bunch of my older bank statements as text files and convert them to a format Wesabe likes for manual upload. It took me several hours to go through a year’s worth of expenses and tag everything.
The reporting tools are not very good. I couldn’t get a report by tag for the year, which it turns out that others are kvetching about as well. What I did do is export all the transactions from all accounts, pop ‘em into Excel, sort by tag, and then insert subtotals. That also took me a while to figure out, but once you know how to do it, it actually takes just a few minutes. I just printed out that puppy and skipped over to my accountant’s office.
Now, Wesabe is chugging away in the background, uploading my stuff. I pop in there every month or so and do a little tagging of things it doesn’t know. My tax report for this year is going to be a walk in the park!
Blinksale
Blinksale is an online invoicing service. I’ve been looking at it for a while, but was resistant. Now that I’m using it, I cannot for the life of me remember why.
My old way was to make an invoice in Word. Enter it into my little Excel spreadsheet. Send client the email with the attached file. My spreadsheet kept track of my total invoices as well as what was outstanding, and it served me well for many years. Except sometimes I would forget to mark if someone paid. And then I would have to root around in my bank records to find out if they actually did.
So, I signed up for the free account, which allows you to send three invoices per month. It also gives you a link to your PayPal account if you want to let folks pay by credit card online. Sometimes my clients ask me about paying by credit card. So, I upgraded my PayPal account to a business one, and started invoicing through BlinkSale.
It’s really easy. And in a weird way, a little fun. The thing I like about it is that I can see all my invoices in one glance, and see how many days they’ve been out. You can set how many days the client has to pay, and it goes red when they are overdue. There’s a feature called “Send Reminder” which I now adore. After a month, I upgraded to the $12-a-month account, which allows 50 invoices a month. (No, I don’t do that kind of business! Wish I did! But sometimes, the 3 per month wasn’t doing the job.)
The only thing I don’t like about it is there is no way to automatically add on the 2.9% PayPal charges if the client is paying with a credit card. I found that out when I had to eat $74 of a recent invoice. That’s a pretty good dinner for two! So now, I’m being more judicious with the PayPal link when I send out the invoice.
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1E. David Luria | July 23, 2008
Debra is a genius!
very good information here, thank you so much!
Signed
Big Fan
David L.