Financial Web App Follow Up

A while ago I wrote a post about the 4 major players in the personal finance web application world.  To my surprise, it attracted a lot of attention.  In fact, it has been the most viewed page on my site in the last month.  I got responses from the CEO of Wasabe, as well as several e-mails.  I thought I’d do a follow up to show people where I’ve gone since that last post.

As it turns out, Mint.com finally got support for my bank.  I was really excited to see this and I quickly added my loans back on.  Everything worked well and it continues to be the application that I use today.  I only have one major problem with Mint, and that is that you can’t automatically put transactions into certain categories based on user defined filters.  Mint does a lot of this for you, but there are some transactions that don’t get categorized and I’d like to be able to say something like “if the transaction has X text, put it into Y category”.  The main reason for this is that my bank actually posts the Pre-Auth ATM “charge” before every use of my debit card.  This is basically a fake charge that occurs before the transaction posts for good.  When Mint gets my bank data, it essentially thinks the Pre-Auth charge is just a normal transaction and so it removes double the money from my account.  The weirdest part is that the transactions clearly don’t add up to my current balance, probably because it pulls the balance by itself and doesn’t even worry about adding up all the transactions.

My Latest Web Project

I recently finished work on a new website for the composer Les Taylor, a friend and mentor to me, who also owns a publishing company.  I spent a total of about 4 days working off and on to complete the new lestaylorpublications.com.  I consider this site to be a great success because of the speed of my work.  I was very fortunate to have had a few days of extreme productivity that allowed me to complete the site much more quickly than I normally would have.  The largest feature is the music Catalog, which uses a MySQL database to display info about each piece and allows the software to sort music in different ways.  I also spent a few hours setting up a blog for Les and edited one of the standard WordPress themes to fit within the header and footer design that I created for the rest of the site.

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