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I started tracking my money with buxfer.

I love this service! I can insert all transaction types I can imagine and buxfer handles the information in a quite intelligent way. Grouping tags in a tree-style is a killer, too! It’s great to know in which category one have spent more/less money than the month before.

Other competitors seem to be quite U.S. centric. buxfer is not! I can easily track my euros with buxfer.

Security Issues:
buxfer is all https and does not know more about you than your email. That is ok for me. Aditionally it uses GoogleGears to allow you to store confidental data only on your computer.

I hope I will continue add all my transactions, won’t loose continuity. But the obtained information is a good motivation.

And by the way: The buxfer SMS interface allows me to account every beer I just paid using my mobile directly at the bar.

Additionally, since my financical institution is not handled by automtic import I have written a small Ruby script that changes the data format to the format known by buxfer. For shure you have to rewrite it, but take it as hint:

require ‘csv’

outfile = File.open(’out.csv’, ‘wb’)
out = CSV::Writer.generate(outfile,’,')

#02-Oct-2007, Paycheck, 400.00, salary

tag_uplook = {
“POL” => “insurance”,
“LINZ AG” => “electricity”,
“Falkner” => “rent”,
“HOFER” => “food”,
“Interspar” => “food”,
“Merkur” => “food”,
“Leasing” => “carleasing”,
“proberaum” => “delilah”,
“BEZUEGE” => “salary”,
“Liwest” => “internet”,
“T-MOBILE” => “phone”
}

CSV.open(’in.csv’, ‘r’,';’) do |row|
p row
date = row[0]
description = row[1]
amount = row[3].to_f
tag = “”

tag_uplook.each do |pattern, t|
if description.match(pattern)
tag = t
break
end
end

out << [ date, description, amount, tag]
end

out.close