Mint vs Yodlee vs Quicken

Over the weekend, due to compelling reasons I'll get to later, I took a deep-dive into the two most popular online "Banking 2.0" products: Yodlee and Mint. My overall impression: These guys really have a long way to go.

This isn't really a review of either. Instead, it's more of a wish-list... for what I wish either Yodlee or Mint were, but alas, they are not.

First, I admit it. I love Quicken. I've used some version of Quicken's desktop product since I migrated from MS Money in 2002. Well, actually, when I went anti-Windows and switched to FreeBSD in 2004, I couldn't get Quicken to work with Wine and gave GNUCash a whirl for a few months. But eventually I returned to my beloved financial management software (the only reason I returned to Windows). I currently use Quicken 2008 Home and Business.

And my wife, well, she's a financial analyst. She likes crunching numbers more than shopping for shoes, if you can believe it. (Ok, that's probably stretching it a bit.)

My point is that we're not just managing our weekly allowances here. We're serious about our finances and our financial futures.

What do we like about Quicken?

While we have a lot of gripes with Quicken that I won't go into, none of them prevent us from getting the job done. Sometimes we just have to be creative or work a bit harder to understand how Quicken works.

For starters, we love the automated account aggregation features. We've gone so far as to move nearly all of our accounts to banks that support updating via Quicken's OneStep Update feature because it saves so much time in reconciling accounts, analyzing our 401k's, IRA's and brokerage accounts and tracking loan and credit card balances.

We also love the ability to categorize transactions and then tag categories to specific tax line-items. Though I use QuickBooks for my business accounting, we both incur a not-insignificant amount of unreimbursed work-related expenses. We also donate to charity, have capital gains, have healthcare-related expenses, student loans and mortgage interest. While tax time is never 'a breeze', it certainly isn't the nightmare it would be without Quicken.

Finally, we love Quicken's reporting. We use the custom reporting features extensively to drill down and better understand every aspect of our spending and our investments, to compare to previous periods and to ensure that we're always improving our situation. We don't have to experiment or guess.

So why would I want to move away from Quicken?

Perhaps my wife and I are peculiar in this respect, or perhaps not. We each have our own computers for normal, day-to-day use and we share an old laptop for our "family" activities. Turns out the only thing installed on said laptop is Quicken.

Ideally, we'd both love to have access to our Quicken data from our own machines, with the data itself stored on our shared file-server. I know there are convoluted or 3rd-party ways to make this happen, but the fact is that Quicken is not designed to run this way. All of the work-arounds have some limitation we're unwilling to accept or risk we're unwilling to take.

And, just recently, I found out that I'm going to be traveling extensively. Though we share the laptop with Quicken installed, we each take responsibility for updating our individual accounts, categorizing transactions and making manual entries when required. As I anticipate being on the road for weeks and possibly months at a time, I feel horrible about making my wife take care of all of our finances alone.

Wouldn't it be great if Quicken existed 'in the cloud'?

My wife initially suggested that I install some Remote Desktop application so that I could access the shared laptop over the internet and keep my accounts up-to-date. To me, that seemed really cludgy and so 2004. I asked her to give me some time to investigate our online options as I was sure there was a solution out there. Here's what I found:

Aggregation

Both Yodlee and Mint offer the account aggregation features that Quicken does... but not as nicely. For example, let's say you make a transfer from a savings account to a checking account. Quicken, Yodlee and Mint will all download the transfer transaction from the banks for both accounts.

But Quicken goes one step further and, while the transfer shows in both accounts, it considers the transfer a single transaction. You can tag it, classify it, add a memo to it, change the description or whatever, and the changes show up in both accounts. In Yodlee and Mint, these are separate transactions and to get the reporting to work correctly, you have to edit the transaction twice, once for each account.

Budgeting

Both Yodlee and Mint offer budgeting features, if you want to call it that. What they really offer is the ability to set a monthly goal for each expense category, let you report on how your actual spending compares to your budget and can alert you when a category is getting close to going over your goal. It's the old 'envelope budget' method I suppose.

Perhaps this is enough for someone in high school managing their income from their part-time job at the local cinema. Adults are more sophisticated and require more sophisticated budgeting and forecasting tools. Both Yodlee and Mint fail miserably in this area.

Taxes

Yodlee and Mint both have, for individual transactions, a checkbox to identify that transaction as "tax related". I am at a complete loss as to how this could be helpful to anyone.

Hopefully Mint, being owned by Inuit (the guys who make Quicken and TurboTax) will come up with some tighter tax integration features... and preferably let customers tag categories to specific tax line-items like Quicken does today.

Accessibility

Both Yodlee and Mint have one up on Quicken. They are accessible anytime and from anywhere you have a web browser and internet connection... including your mobile phone. Our instance of Quicken sits securely on a laptop and is accessible only from that laptop. And while I could go through the trouble of setting up a VPN tunnel... well, that's a lot of trouble. The Remote Desktop solution is, unfortunately, the only solution I see as viable.

Conclusion

As I mentioned before, if you're managing your income from a part-time job or managing your weekly allowance from your parents, the 'snapshot' view of your transactions provided by the likes of Yodlee and Mint might be sufficient. But it's exactly that... a snapshot view. Neither Yodlee nor Mint allow for managing your finances.

And while Quicken does nearly everything very well, the fact that it is a desktop app is severely limiting to those of us who 'tele-home' (my newly-coined term for those of us who have to spend significant amounts of time away from home, yet still want to feel a part of it).