Expensr: Free Online Personal Finance Manager

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One of the things that constantly plague my personal finance life is how I’m going to track my finances. I’ve gone from using MS Money to Quicken, then to a paper based system, back to Money. Now I’m using a hybrid of Money and paper. I haven’t found a system that I feel comfortable with.

I’d love to use Money all the time. My biggest problem with it is that it has too many unwanted features. MS Money can get really complicated really fast.

If you’re like me and would like a computer based finance system, but hate the complexity of the ones on the market, you should give expensr a try.

Expensr is pretty much MS Money and Quicken pared down to the bare essentials. You can easily keep track of your spending and accounts online. Like MS Money, expensr produces charts to show your progress, spending, and money allocation; however, the charts in expensr are much simpler and clean looking than the ones on Money. It also creates monthly reports that show what your average daily spending was for the month.

The feature that separates expensr from other personal finance applications is the community feature. You can tag your spending with different keywords and see what other expensr users spend on those same type of items. You can also give yourself tags like “a student” or “in my twenties”. From those tags, you can see what people like you are spending and perhaps get advice from them.

Overall, expensr is a really slick personal finance app. It’s definitely a viable alternative to Quicken or Money. Best of all, expensr is free!

Go by and see if expensr is right for you.

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3 Comments

1. Sara on 06.07.2007 at 19:36 (Reply)

   Thanks for the suggestion! I just tried it today and it seems really great, we’ll see how I feel about it in a month or so!

2. Andrew Flusche on 06.07.2007 at 23:29 (Reply)

   Hey Brett,

   This looks like a great find! But I’m too much of a MS Money fan to jump ship. I’m curious; do you have some specific examples of how Money is too complicated? It’s got lots of features, and I definitely don’t use them all. But there are some that I couldn’t live without (e.g., splitting a single transaction into multiple categories).

   Call me crazy, but I’m a bit weary of doing financial stuff on a free app like that. I guess my spending habits don’t have to be that private, but it still makes me nervous.

   With that said, an online app is a great solution for managing money in a marriage. MS Money is installed on my wife’s computer, since it’s a desktop. But that means I have to wait until she’s not using it to lookup something or pay a bill. And an online system could have a mobile version for access via phone, to check balances on the go.

   OK, I’m done rambling. This was a great post; it got me thinking about important things.

   Andrew

3. A Mom on 08.07.2007 at 07:25 (Reply)

   Hi Brett,

   It’s pretty detailed, you could run a business with it. I suppose each person’s finance or budgeting needs depends on how much time they have or want to spend managing their money. I prefer a simple spreadsheet planner that tells me how much I need to save for expenses and easily see which areas I should work on.

   A Mom

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