My project was a personal financial management application for students (the actual title was FAST: Financial Analysis for STudents although my final application was called Muney). Essentially I was having problems with my finances a while ago, being the good programmer that I am, I had a look at what software was available. To be honest, from a students perspective, Microsoft Money & Quicken are pretty terrible. Users are required to have a significant amount of financial knowledge to use them effectively. In their defense, these app's aren’t really aimed at the student demographic.

This was obviously a known problem since I found a few web applications such as wesabe & buxfer, which were developed to solve just this problem. Although these applications are much more student friendly they were really basic, not offering solutions for tasks students are commonly pretty poor at performing (e.g. bill management, budgeting)

So based on this, I decided to develop a financial application which automates important monetary tasks and does so in a way which is easy for a student, with no prior financial knowledge, to understand and use. The application was written using C# & Castle Project's Monorail framework a screen shot is shown below

The application had a variety of features including

• Bulk importing financial information via an OFX parser (currently open sourcing the parser I had to write to achieve this)
• Automatically renaming and categorizng transactions
• Bill managment (including automatically discovering new bills and recognizing transactions as payments for bills via clustering techniques)
• Automatic budgeting (including time series forecasting to predict a users expenditure)

Since i covered quite a few topics devloping these features, i'm going to split this blog into a series of articles. The application can be split up into three tasks, organizing, managing and planning a users finances:

Here are the articles discussing these tasks

• Organization
• Managment (coming soon...)
  
• Planning (coming soon...)

Buxfer helps you track your money and keep track of who owes you what.  You can sync it with your credit card and bank accounts so you can see exactly where your money is being spent.  It allows you to send and receive payments using Amazon Payments so your friends can't use the excuse that "they don't have the cash on them right now".  The most useful part of Buxfer is that you can do all this from the Web, SMS, Twitter, and your iPhone.

So, to my friend who got screwed at dinner last weekend, these screencasts of how to use Buxfer on the Web and with the iPhone, are for you:

Buxfer for the iPhone

Buxfer on the Web

There are few alternatives to billmonk like buxfer.. We haven't done a technical evaluation of billmonk against buxfer (http://buxfer.com) or any other softwares.. But we have nothing much to complain about billmonk.. One thing though, If billmonk helps me track my personal expenses as well, it would just be perfect.. And of course, a mobile app for the same would go a long way

Hace dos dias me di a la tarea de conseguir una aplicación, libre o gratuita que me ayudara un poco a llevar de forma ordenada mis cuentas tales como Pagos, Cobros, Gastos, etc. Pues bien, lo primero que hice fue entrar a Softonic, el sitio al que generalmente recurro para conseguir aplicaciones. Naturalmente al hacer una busqueda por contabilidad personal, encontré alrededor de 20 aplicaciones entre gratuitas y pagas, que según sus autores ayudan a llevar las cuentas personales facilmente. Sin embargo, esta vez tenia muy claro que la aplicación que necesitaba debia ser online, y no tener que depender exclusivamente de mi PC para ingresar un nuevo asiento o transaccion a mi contabilidad.

Cuando ya estaba casi resignado y luego de considerar durante varias horas la noche anterior de desarrollar mi propia aplicación online para el manejo de mi contabilidad personal, me encuentro con Moneytrackin', una interesante aplicación online bastante intuitiva y sencilla que usandola de manera adecuada te puede ayudar a controlar tus gastos y por supuesto a reflexionar sobre la forma en la que estás gastando o ahorrando tu dinero.

La aplicación como dije es bastante sencilla, en nada parecida a los paquetes informaticos contables existentes en el mercado, pensada para personas comunes y corrientes que solo necesitan llevar una bitacora de los gastos e ingresos diarios, razón por la cual no veremos las cuentas que escuchamos en nuestras clases de contabilidad como Cuentas por pagar, Bancos, Proveedores, etc. Funciona mas bien como un libro diario, en el que detallas una transaccion como Ingreso o Gasto, pero que además permite colocarles tags, las cuales nos ayudaran mas adelante a mostrar reportes con graficos por tags especificas.

Como caracteristicas adicionales, moneytrackin' tambien es accesible desde nuestro telefono movil, además existe una extension para firefox que nos permite ingresar nuevas transacciones de forma rápida. Para usarlo es necesario solamente registrarse con un email, contraseña y nombre de usuario validos e inmediatamente personalizarlo segun nuestras necesidades.

Uno de los contras que he encontrado hasta el momento es la pobre documentación con la que cuenta, sobre todo en el idioma español.

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Otra aplicación que encontré poco después y que se encuentra un poco mas desarrollada que moneytrackin es Buxfer, la cual posee un demo que podemos revisar antes de registranos para interactuar con ella y conocerla mas a fondo. El unico inconveniente que le encontré es que se encuentra disponible solo en el idioma inglés.

1. The Daily Plate

This tops my list because it has turned me into a serious calorie counter and has made me conscious about portions. To get you started, just sign up and begin using the service. You will be asked your weight goal and the site computes how many calories you need to consume in order to lose two pounds a week. Everyday you have to visit the site and log your food intake and exercise. Type in the food you ate on the search bar and you will be led to a page where the nutritional facts are displayed and what healthier options there are.

2. Mashable

I love this site's long list of services to try. I was able to see the interesting add-ons Mozilla has. Be careful with what you install in your computer though.

3. Lifehacker

Are you big on self-improvement? This blog is about being a better geek (really about productivity). It allows readers to see how online services can make you work faster .

4. Buxfer
Track your spending with this nifty (free) service. The concept is similar to the Daily Plate. Buxfer automatically computes your spending patterns for the month and produces reports on where your salary goes. Hook it up with your mobile phone and Twitter. You'll be able to input your recent purchases in the Buxfer system. This will save your personal finances! I swear by it. It can wreak havoc in your phone bill since the messages cost Php.15 per update.

5. Munchpunch

My friends and I find this site miraculous because now we can plan where to go and foresee how much to spend on dinner. The site has the menus of restaurants in Manila and GMA.

Venture capitalists have been busy investing in personal-finance Web start-ups, attempting to tap into a new generation of consumers who have never balanced a checkbook and increasingly view online money management as they would any other kind of Web service.

Read the rest of the story here or here.

A number of well-executed personal finance management web startups have been in the spotlight in recent months, including Mint — which won the Techcrunch 40 startup competition — Wesabe and Geezeo. Buxfer, however, has been flying under the radar, and it shouldn’t be.

Beyond a clean interface for tracking your purchases, payments and trends in your spending habits (see screenshot, below), the company has been developing some impressive new features. One is a use of Google Gears that lets you store sensitive financial information on your machine, which is sure to please those concerned about online financial privacy. It also has new, useful Twitter and iPhone integration.

Taking a break from the Ph.D. program was a tough decision because all three of us were doing well in our Ph.D.s. It was particularly tough for Ashwin and myself, because the two of us, each having already spent over five and a half years, were just a few months away from finishing our Ph.D's. So by taking a leave of absence, we took a big risk. But then, if we did not take a risk, we would not be entrepreneurs :-).

We arrived at the decision primarily because we felt that Buxfer was solving a real need and could grow rapidly, if we worked on it full-time. We already had a lot of momentum behind us. We were getting a lot of users, thanks to an Associate Press article, versions of which were reproduced at over 100 newspapers in the US and around the world. We felt this momentum would be hard to regenerate later. Plus,YCombinator was another important factor in our decision. Finally, it was getting extremely difficult to simultaneously work on both the] Ph.D. and Buxfer, because each one is a 24/7 job in itself.

And so we took the plunge. In retrospect, we took a good decision. Since working full-time on Buxfer, things have been moving rapidly -- both in terms of adding new features, and in terms of getting users to actually use the site.

Way to go guys. Over the past 3 months they have added quite a lot features on their website. They have come up with complete expense management tool -- not only can you see who owes you money, but you can also see where you spent your money in a nice google-finance style widget.

Btw the acquisition of BillMonk has just heated this space of money management. :)
All the best guys.

Amit told me that Buxfer started more from the their own need. It was difficult keeping track of the group expenses. So the more enterprising guy Ashwin created a script to track their money. It was really useful and loads of people asked them to share it with them also. That is when they saw the apple falling created Buxfer.

We started talking about the various other things and quickly find out some common friends. So very Indian :D. Aur phir dilli ki baatein shuru ho gayi jo kabhi khatam na hon :D. It was real fun.

Its real nice to see people doing innovative things to make our lives simpler. Keep up the good work guys. :)