A few months ago I posted a review of the financial management site mint.com. In general I gave it a very glowing review because I really liked it. I still do. However, I was turned on to a different site this week that, while not as refined as mint is even more powerful. The funny thing is, when I signed up for mint, mint actually told me about this competing site - but I didn't listen.
The site I'm talking about is Yodlee. Yodlee is kind of a clearinghouse for monetary information. All sorts of transactions pass through their system and, in fact, it is where Mint goes to get all of your data (and, coincidentally, where Mint stores your account credentials). Mint just puts a really nice wrapper on top of what Yodlee offers; except mint doesn't offer everything Yodlee does (yet).
The key part of any of these sites is that they provide me with the ability to see an overarching view of my entire financial situation at a glance. Mint goes about half way to that end; Yodlee gets about 90% of the way. For instance, some of the accounts that I can view in Yodlee that are missing from my mint account are my mortgage, home equity loan, paypal account, 401k plan, and my daughters 529 plans. Yodlee gives me all of those and tons of details about each. In fact, I get more detail about my 401k plan from within Yodlee about my recent activity than I do from my 529 plans website. What's up with that?
Yodlee isn't all sunshine though. Like I said Mint has a nice sugary coating on it that makes it super easy to use and asks very little of the user before you can start gleaning some very useful information. Yodlee's UI isn't nearly as polished and, at first, doesn't seem even remotely as powerful. However, after digging into it for a while today I have gotten it to mimic most of what Mint offered with the added bonus of a much deeper view of my finances. It's great.
Here are some tips if you decide to give Yodlee a try:
- Define some sub-categories. Mint has some defined out of the box. Yodlee is actually better in this regard because you can define as many categories as you want. With mint you are stuck with the categories they give you. (In mint's defense you can also tag things with all the tags you want, called labels in mint, and you can't do that in Yodlee. However, you can't run any of the graphical reports in mint against tags so I have found little value to that feature).
- Go to the options page and make your default homepage the "Dashboard" It is what gives you the quick look into your current status.
- Import as many accounts as you can think of. They also let you import many of the places you pay bills to. For instance I added in my Dish network account - it is handy for letting me see not just when I spend money but also where it is all going. One thing I do like better about Mint is the ability to graph trends by vendor (such as walmart, kroger, toy-r-us, etc - you can't do that in Yodlee unless you have it in there as an account - that kind of sucks).
- Also on the options page notice you can organize your dashboard a little - By default the right column is MUCH taller than the left so shift things around a bit so you get a good balance.
- After you have imported a bunch of accounts define a custom account group that contains just your primary accounts (checking, savings and that's it). Then setup the transactions module on the dashboard to just show that group. It makes it much easier to focus on your actual cash flow at a glance while still letting you run deep and complex reports
- When you login and go to add an account the first time you will pick a bank, say Bank of America, and then it will put BoA in the left column - but never have asked you for your account info. You aren't really done with the BoA account addition yet - you've just queued up BoA for addition to your account.
After you identify all the institutions you want to add they will be listed in the left column, at that point just go through each (there is an add account link under each) and provide your info and, in no time, you'll have a full composite of your finances.
I like Yodlee so much I'm going to be deleting my mint account and, as much as I like mint, that is saying something. I still prefer the UI of mint and I love the charting based on merchant, but in the end I really don't need those as much as I do the deeper insight into my finances. Both are free so the depth of coverage was the deal breaker for me.