INNOBLOG

I've spent some time recently exploring the blogosphere to find reviews of various online money management services, including Mint, Wesabe, Geezeo and others. The interest is personal - Ive been a Mint user for the past few months and though Im relatively satisfied with the experience, Ive been wondering how Mint stacks up against the competition. As someone who could never get into the habit of using Quicken or Microsoft Money (although one program came with my computer and I bought the other a couple of years back in order to fulfill a short-lived New Years resolution to keep better track of my finances), I was a bit surprised by some of the criticisms I read:

"You cant import data to Mint in any way other than through your financial institution, meaning that if youve got years worth of financial data [on your computer], dont count on importing it

"Mint doesnt export data

"Without double entry book-keeping, you will not detect bank errors! Theres no forced monthly reconciliation, and no way for you to notice, Hey, wait a minute, I didnt shop there, unless you scrutinize each item yourself

I wasnt surprised by these criticisms because they werent valid or true, or because I couldnt see a rationale for the features mentioned. What surprised me was that I didn't care about these features at all. I realized that feature-filled programs like Quicken and Microsoft Money overshot my needs. And if they overshot my needs, they likely overshot the needs of others (e.g., students or anybody with a relatively simple financial picture). This spurred a question: What, if anything are Microsoft and Intuit trying to do for the customers they are overshooting?

Turns out that the folks at Intuit are on top of their game (not too surprising, since they'd had previous success with low-end disruptive products like QuickBooks). They launched an web-based solution, Quicken Online, this past January. A stripped-down version of their stand-alone Quicken product, Quicken Online allows users to keep track of all of their accounts and transactions in one place that is easy to access and has a simple interface and auto-tagging features similar to would-be disruptors like Mint or Wesabe.

Of course, Quicken Online's success isnt guaranteed. This is a crowded space. Mint, Wesabe, Geezeo, Buxter, Expensr are all fighting to manage money online. And Quicken's biggest differentiator isn't a good one: while the other sites I've just listed are free after the 30-day trial, Quicken Online charges users $2.99 a month. Not a lot to today's stand-alone Quicken user (who pays at least $30 for the software, plus $5-10/month for automatic bank account transaction downloads), but a price that is perhaps infinitely higher to the young twenty-somethings with simple financial pictures, who only want to see snapshots of money in and money out.

Quicken Online's simplicity demonstrates that Intuit understands the disruptive threat posed by web-based money management solutions and is taking action to defend itself, but Im not sure it shows that they truly understand the jobs-to-be-done and objectives of their target customer. It is hard for me to see myself paying $2.99/month for Quicken Online when Mint can meet my needs for free.

But I guess I have a 30-day trial to find out. Look for an update in April.