Balance your bucks with Buxfer
(Credit: CNET Networks)Don't expect to get an online version of Microsoft Excel when you join Buxfer, a site to track shared bills and expenses. In fact, don't expect much beyond basic features when managing a shared bill, a personal expense, or an incoming or outgoing money transfer. Competing with other finance-sharing sites such as BillMonk and iOweyou, Buxfer is best suited for roommates and groups of friends who share expenses and want to sort out the bills later.
Buxfer's math genius automatically splits the cost of your rent and groceries among participants into either equal or weighted shares. A quick glance at your contact list summarizes who owes whom and how much, which is nice if you're in the green and a wake-up call if you're in the red. I liked being able to input a tag, descriptions, and notes into a transaction, edit and e-mail transaction details, and print entries.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The online app has a few issues. It's obnoxious that logging an expense to your mom requires you to provide her e-mail address, which also spawns an invite for her to join Buxfer. That seems like a cheap tactic for snaring users.
Even more frustrating is the fact that there are no itemization features. Imagine that a group goes on a road trip that incurs a variety of expenses. Each "payer" can be tapped for one reimbursable total and one description per transaction. You can lump your descriptions and sums together in one transaction and total them yourself, or you can create individual transactions for every single trip expense, a process that clutters rather than simplifies. However, the tool is still a work in progress, as IE 7 errors attest. So far Buxfer is useful to a point, but it needs a deeper feature set.
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In particular, I disagree with the following statement in the review:
"It's obnoxious that logging an expense to your mom requires you to provide her e-mail address, which also spawns an invite for her to join Buxfer. That seems like a cheap tactic for snaring users."
The claim above is not true. If you want to report expenses with your mom without entering her email addresses, there are several options:
1) Add a dummy email address (e.g., jessicas_mom@blah.com) and Buxfer will be more than happy to track your expenses with your mom. Buxfer won't urge you to provide any more verifications or confirmations about this person or email address.
2) You can improve the above solution by tagging such transactions with the word "mom", so that you can retrieve them quickly.
There are a couple of other things I would like to point out:
1) "There are no itemization features.": It is true that you cannot itemize a transaction with Buxfer. However, I believe this need is quite infrequent - none of our 2500 users so far have asked for this feature. Given the current interface, you can attach text notes to transactions, and put in any itemization information you want there. That said, at Buxfer, we are always receptive to users' requests and keep rapidly updating our supported feature-set.
2) In general, you haven't spoken at all about the other aspects that Buxfer provides. For example, Buxfer supports the notion of "group transactions" which are incredibly useful for groups of people who transact very often - like roommates. Furthermore, we at Buxfer have invested a lot of effort into making transaction entering as painless as can be. (And we are constantly improving on it!) There are also other aspects like tags, personal expenses, search, etc. which seem to have completely evaded your attention.
In particular, I disagree with the following statement in the review:
"It's obnoxious that logging an expense to your mom requires you to provide her e-mail address, which also spawns an invite for her to join Buxfer. That seems like a cheap tactic for snaring users."
The claim above is not true. If you want to report expenses with your mom without entering her email addresses, there are several options:
1) Add a dummy email address (e.g., jessicas_mom@blah.com) and Buxfer will be more than happy to track your expenses with your mom. Buxfer won't urge you to provide any more verifications or confirmations about this person or email address.
2) You can improve the above solution by tagging such transactions with the word "mom", so that you can retrieve them quickly.
There are a couple of other things I would like to point out:
1) "There are no itemization features.": It is true that you cannot itemize a transaction with Buxfer. However, I believe this need is quite infrequent - none of our 2500 users so far have asked for this feature. Given the current interface, you can attach text notes to transactions, and put in any itemization information you want there. That said, at Buxfer, we are always receptive to users' requests and keep rapidly updating our supported feature-set.
2) In general, you haven't spoken at all about the other aspects that Buxfer provides. For example, Buxfer supports the notion of "group transactions" which are incredibly useful for groups of people who transact very often - like roommates. Furthermore, we at Buxfer have invested a lot of effort into making transaction entering as painless as can be. (And we are constantly improving on it!) There are also other aspects like tags, personal expenses, search, etc. which seem to have completely evaded your attention.
Amit Manjhi
Amit Manjhi
1. Expense Categorization: Look at how much you spent across different keywords, or within different groups. A nice looking pie chart helps you quickly summarize what you are spending most on. Very helpful for getting a quick feel of where the money is going out of your wallet. You can then drill down further into transactions within a particular category.
2. Compare trends in your spending pattern: View daily and monthly trends in the way you spend money. Our innovative technology lets you easily visualize the days and months where you had an irregular spending pattern. Look out for spikes and anomalies in the graph, and simply click on the graph to see which transactions cost you the most.
1. Expense Categorization: Look at how much you spent across different keywords, or within different groups. A nice looking pie chart helps you quickly summarize what you are spending most on. Very helpful for getting a quick feel of where the money is going out of your wallet. You can then drill down further into transactions within a particular category.
2. Compare trends in your spending pattern: View daily and monthly trends in the way you spend money. Our innovative technology lets you easily visualize the days and months where you had an irregular spending pattern. Look out for spikes and anomalies in the graph, and simply click on the graph to see which transactions cost you the most.