Or maybe it just sucks in general. I’ll explain.
No, I’ll sum up. I have used probably a dozen budgeting and account aggregation tools in my lifetime. Mint, Wealthfront, YNAB, and others provided by my various banking institutions. The problem I’ve found is that none of them have ever worked. And by worked I mean done what they’re intended to do: create a place where you can track and manage all your spending, do some budgeting, and not have to log into every site in the world and do data entry.
Problem is, none of the damn things work! Sure, they may be able to pull 90% of your accounts, but there’s always one or two missing. Usually these are smaller institutions, or places like Wells-Fargo or USAA that (I believe) try to block their customers from using other services. In any case, you’re still not getting all the information you need to make the service a one-stop place. There’s always one account that you need to add manually, or continually refresh, or take action on every few days.
And while the transaction categorisation works kind of, it doesn’t work well. If you need to go in and categorize transactions every few days, you might as well just track spending yourself in a spreadsheet. In almost all cases, I have to go in and categorize and re-categorize transactions continually to make sure they’re reflected correctly. Which leads me to my biggest gripe.
None of these tools is effective for someone running side hustles. I have multiple businesses and they’re all small enough that running them through an entity would be cost-prohibitive. So, I have multiple sources of funds and multiple payees, all of which need to get tracked. But there is enough crossover that the account aggregation services get everything muddled because of a lack of available specificity in how you can categorize income and expenses.
So, I the old-fashioned mark one spreadsheet. True, it’s cumbersome and data-entry intensive, but so are the so-called streamlined services. All that being said, however, if you know of an account aggregation service that answers my above gripes (or you develop one) please let me know. I would dearly love to stop having to deal with typing numbers into spreadsheets one day.
