A few years ago I started using Quicken to manage my business and personal accounting.
At the time it was a great tool to manage my tiny cashflow – I was a poor student, and delivering pizzas for $8.50 an hour plus tips a few nights a week. I had to be ultra careful with my spending because my non-discretionary expenses must’ve been in the magnitude of 95% of my income. I had a credit card with a limit of about $1,000 and a bank account to my name.
Back then, the thing that peeved me off was the amount of manual labour involved in keeping the various account transactions up to date. Certainly I made it harder for myself by tracking even petty cash, but the banks had virtually no support for automated synchronization. Once I graduated from my course and started earning enough not to worry about financial implosion, I gladly laid my Quicken data to rest.
Fast forward 4 years and i’m starting to think in terms of buying a house, new car, and even live and work abroad.
So I had a look at a nifty web service called Buxfer. I was quickly impressed at the simple, application-like interface, and even more impressed at the promised synchronization with my actual banking data. Within minutes I had an account up and running. Not surprisingly, none of my Australian financial institutions were listed in the supported banks, but then I discovered a Firefox addon that supposedly would retrieve my data in a semi-automated way.
Cool! Or so I thought. But alas, as it turns out, the addon is not capable of logging in and retrieving any of my banking data. And its not really surprising, given the mine field of javascript and security precautions the banking sites have… Read more