Wheaties for Your Wallet

You’d think that a completely new Automatic Uploader would have been all for today, especially after a new release of the Firefox Uploader yesterday and a datacenter move last weekend. But no.

I’m very happy to announce the new Wesabe Tips tab. We’ve been working on the new version of Tips for a while, and in many ways, it fulfills the whole idea of Wesabe: to automatically and easily find ways for people to get more for their money. We’re calling this idea the Wesabe “Value Engine,” and we think it’s a great way to find values in your current spending, local to your neighborhood.

When you manage your finances on Wesabe, we look through the places you spend, and find suggestions for competitors that might offer you lower prices, higher satisfaction, or ideally, both. We then suggest those comparisons to you right in the transaction list of your accounts:

These tips are pulled out of the billions of dollars worth of transactions that members have uploaded to Wesabe. We look at how much people spend at a merchant, how often they come back to give that merchant repeat business, and what they have to say about their satisfaction with that merchant. From these points, we build a comparison that lets you narrow in on the values in your neighborhood, and decide which merchant is best for you and your needs:

In the case above, Wesabe recommended a local grocery store I’ve seen but have never been to, since I shopped at a more expensive option, Andronico’s, in my area. What’s great about this tip is that it shows me a cheaper option that also makes far more people happy. That’s great for me to know, and it may very well change where I shop.

You can also use the very rich tagging data on Wesabe to find related merchants that might be hidden values, or might be well-known to you as brands but not as economic options:

Here, people spend more at Ikea than at other “home“-tagged items, but they’re also far more happy with it. Between Lowe’s and Home Depot, two close competitors, Lowe’s costs a little more but also seems to make more customers satisfied.

On top of that, you can search for merchants that you know about, and want to learn more about — and that you want to compare to other options in your area:

As a consumer, these kind of comparisons, and this kind of data, just haven’t been available before. We know about big brands, and maybe we think well of them, or maybe we don’t. But while they know all about us — our credit score, our salary, where we shop, and even our personal details — we know far too little about them. Wesabe Tips intend to change that, and to empower consumers to make better decisions with our money.

This is a new feature, so the quality and number of tips we identify will vary based on how long you’ve been using Wesabe, and how you tag. We also know that you’ll find some hilariously bad suggestions in there — our favorite in testing was, “Don’t shop at Federal Income Tax — State Income Tax is way more affordable!” Oops. In order to account for problems like this, we’ve added a way for you to say, no, this tip isn’t useful, and here’s why:

The more feedback like this we get, the better the recommendations will become.

Of course, all of our aggregate data is available for free, without registering, to anyone. We’ll talk more about getting the most out of the Tips tab in the weeks to come. Also, all of the Tips our members have contributed over the past year and a half are now part of the new Tips system — check out, for instance, the creditcard tag, which is full of fantastic advice from Wesabeans.

Congratulations to everyone at Wesabe — especially Jeff, Brad, and Coda — for their work on this great new feature. We hope that this is a great new tool in the movement to empower consumers, so that we can all get more from our money and reach our financial goals.

I’m very happy to announce the release of the Wesabe Automatic Uploader, a new way to keep your accounts updated on Wesabe simply and easily:

As I mentioned in February, many of our members have asked for a way to keep their accounts up to date on Wesabe without having to download a client application, and without having to manually upload. We hear again and again from people that they love how we offer them tools that get them set up without having to give their bank passwords to a startup company — but that after using and coming to trust the site, they want a higher level of convenience. The new Wesabe Automatic Uploader means that for all covered accounts — including nearly 90% of the accounts on our site, and more and more all the time — you can enter your credentials once and then never have to deal with uploading again. The whole process takes under two minutes to set up, and works great.

We’re very happy to be able to make updating your accounts easier, since of course Wesabe aims to be the easiest to use, most powerful, and importantly, the most effective tool for getting the most from your money. But more than that, I’m also very happy that we have been able to build the best and most secure option for automatic updates. Unlike our competitors, we do not give your credentials to a third-party data middleman service — instead of having your data thrown around by a set of companies, with Wesabe your data stays just between you, your bank, and our site. Unlike our competitors, we don’t have to wait for a vendor to fix their code when something breaks. And unlike our competitors, we do not rely on fragile and unreliable “screen scraping” methods. Instead, we’ve built data import tools from scratch that allow us to support far more banks, credit unions, and credit cards, and do so much more efficiently. We believe our approach offers more flexibility, reliability, security, and privacy, than any other option you have. It also allows us to offer our Data Bill of Rights, which gives you full control of the ownership of your data, and our open API, which allows you full access to your data stored on Wesabe.

Not all accounts are supported, yet (Tanc, I hear you!), but we’re working on adding more accounts all the time. For those accounts that aren’t yet in the system, or for those people who do not want to use the Automatic Uploader, we are continuing to support our Firefox, Desktop, and Manual Uploaders indefinitely. We know that these tools allow people around the world, and with accounts at smaller banks and credit unions, to enjoy automated updates, and to keep control of their credentials where they want them. As long as people want them, we are not in any way removing these options.

To get started with the Automatic Uploader, sign into Wesabe and you’ll see an “Auto Upload Available” link for all your accounts that are currently supported. Click that link and you’ll be led through the two-step process to enable your account. Or, click “Add an Account” for any new account you want to upload to Wesabe, and you’ll be prompted for your credentials if the account is supported.

Congratulations to Brian, Jeff, Andre, Sam, and Tim for all their work on this great release. The design of the feature and its simplicity are unmatched, and its great to be able to offer the ease of use we know people want. Let us know what you think!

The Wesabe Firefox Uploader continues to be a very popular tool for working with Wesabe. Many of our members tell us that they love the Wesabe Dashboard, which shows you account balances, recent transactions, and pie and bar graphs of your spending. And, of course, it makes it very easy to automate uploads from nearly any financial institution — even smaller banks, credit unions, and credit cards that other sites refuse to support at all. While we are putting a lot of work into the upcoming Automatic Uploader release, we are planning to continue supporting the Firefox and Desktop Uploaders indefinitely.

Today I’m happy to announce the 2.0 release of the Firefox Uploader, which now supports Firefox 3.0 (beta 5 or, when future versions are released, later). Firefox 3.0 is looking to be a great revision, and we wanted to be fully ready to support it when it is released. Tim did a big overhaul of the Firefox Uploader to make it work with the newer Firefox code, and also allow it to support Firefox 2.0 in the same codebase. That way, you can upgrade your browser whenever you want, and still have the latest Firefox Uploader release.

Also, some members have reported that when they switch from one upload method to another, sometimes a duplicate account is created. To avoid that, Tim added a new way to automatically associate a newly-added account with one of your accounts already on Wesabe. Give it a try and you’ll see that it makes this process a ton easier.

Congrats to Tim on the new release. Let us know what you think, and thanks for all the great feedback about the Firefox Uploader. By the way, Tim is speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this Friday, talking about how to build Firefox extensions and about the work he did to support Firefox 3.0. If you’re at the Expo, go give him a pat on the back!

We’re preparing for some big changes to the site, and as part of that preparation, we’ve scheduled downtime for Wesabe this Saturday, April 19th, starting at 8:00pm and ending Sunday morning at 4:00am, Pacific time. (To see the downtime period for your time zone, click here: start time to end time.) We’ll warn about the start of downtime on Twitter, and will post another tweet as soon as the site is back up. (You should follow Wesabe on Twitter to get all updates about the site — very useful and low-volume.)

With any large transition, things may go wrong or take longer than expected. We think it’s better to be up front about that possibility, so we’ve scheduled a fallback downtime for Sunday night, the 20th, again starting at 8:00pm and ending at 4:00am the next morning, Pacific time. If all goes well Saturday night, we will not use this time at all, but we wanted to alert you to the possibility.

Also, we’ll be taking our search system offline for upgrades during this transition. Search will not be enabled when the downtime is complete, but will instead be offline while we test and fix some of the issues many members have seen with it. We’ll post updates on search as soon as we have it stable and working in the new setup.

Again, follow us on Twitter to get all the updates as we go through this transition. Thanks much for your patience through this downtime, and look forward to a bunch of big improvements in the days and weeks to come.

UPDATE: The transition was mostly successful, and the site is up and stable. However, we did have some hardware trouble this morning, and we will be using some of the fallback downtime to fix it. We will be down tonight from 10:00pm to 2:00am, Pacific time. As before, follow us on Twitter to get updates about this. Thanks again for all your patience and support.

Wesabe has had a huge influx of new members over the past few months, each month bringing more (and more and more!) than the last. It’s been great, and we love seeing the site bring so many people together, but we haven’t been able to get back to people with support requests as quickly as we, or you, would like.

As a result, I’m especially happy to welcome Nate to Wesabe, joining us as a member advocate. He’ll be replying to support emails and Groups posts along with Paul and the rest of the Wesabe development group. Welcome, Nate!

As always, we are hiring, and we’re very interested in developers, designers, systems administrators, security engineers, and community advocates who find what we’re doing compelling. You can read more about our development approach here, our privacy approach here, and the main reason this is a great place to work here. If you’d like to join us and help make Wesabe better, drop us a line at “oneofus at wesabe dot com” and tell us what one thing you most want to change about the site, and why you’re the right person to make that change. We’d love to hear from you.

About a year ago, we got a request from a Wesabe user that asked,

Hey, Wesabe is great, and your Uploader is one of the main reasons I joined — asking me to put my bank password into some new web site in order to even try it would have been nuts. But now I’ve been using it for a while, and I trust you. Do you plan to make some way for me to use Wesabe and get automatic updates without having to run the Uploader all the time?

(Another Wesabean was more blunt: “I’m glad you didn’t ask for my passwords on the first date. But now that we’ve been going out for a while….” — well, you get the idea.)

Over the year, we’ve heard the same thing from many people. They started with Wesabe because they believe we care a huge amount about securing their data (and we do). They liked that we provided choices for making their uploads automatic. But after a while, they had come to trust us and believe in our mission, and now they wanted something more convenient from us.

Today, we’re answering that request. We’ve just launched an invitation-only preview to our “Automatic Uploader,” which provides fully automatic updates to your Wesabe accounts, and which does not require you to install any software or downloads from us. If you’re interested in giving it a try, head over to preview.wesabe.com and sign up for an invitation. Today we support fully automatic updates for more than 75% of the accounts on our site, and we plan to launch with about 90% — and since we support more banks and credit cards than other sites, that adds up to a great level of coverage. We’re rolling this out a bit at a time to allow us to scale it up smoothly, and to work out any errors downloading accounts before a general launch.

We believe that it is a huge strength of Wesabe that we offer you choices about how you want to manage your data, and control over your data — moreso than any other company. As part of that, we are continuing to support our Desktop, Firefox, and Manual Uploaders, which give you this benefit, and we will continue to support them as long as people ask us to. But we also want to be the most convenient site, and to do that, we think this is a great step.

In the process of building the Automatic Uploader, we’ve done a bunch of interesting and, we think, innovative security work to make our setup for this as good as it can be — extending our “Super Ninja Privacy Techniques” to this part of the application, too. I’ve written before about why we think that outsourcing data upload to third party companies is terrible for users, and prevents us from giving you the control over your data that we think is critical. This is a great example of what owning the whole process allows us to do: pass on our security benefits to you and make sure we don’t give up any control for you. We’re going to be publishing the methods we’ve developed to make this work once the feature goes into general release.

I’m excited about this launch. We believe in removing any barrier to Wesabe being the best, easiest to use, and most helpful site out there, and I think today we’ve taken another big step out ahead of that. Head over to preview.wesabe.com and let us know what you think.

Jason and I are speaking at a couple of great events this week.

Tomorrow (Monday), I’m speaking at the “Customer Service is the New Marketing” summit, hosted by our friends at Get Satisfaction. We love love love the Satisfaction site and I’m thrilled to be speaking at the conference. I’ll be moderating a panel called “Scaling Customer Service” with Heather Champ, Community Manager from Flickr, Frederick Mendler, Vice President, Fanatical Support from Rackspace, Pratap Penumalli, Consumer Operations Manager from Google, and Ross Mayfield, Founder and President from Socialtext. It should be a great event.

Wednesday, Jason is speaking at the Money:Tech conference in New York. He’ll be presenting an overview of the personal finance space and how Wesabe and its competitors are reshaping a long-established market. We also have a special surprise lined up for the conference, which I think many of you will like a great deal.

If you’re attending either event, please come up and introduce yourself, and tell us the one thing we could improve about Wesabe that would make it better for you. Hope to see you there.

We’ve launched another great new feature tonight: if your bank or credit card isn’t listed as supported in Wesabe, you can add it yourself in under a minute. Why wait months for someone else to decide if they want to help you with your money or not, when you can be up and running in minutes?

We have always tried to be as inclusive as possible in listing every bank, credit union, and credit card, anywhere in the world, and we already have about 5,000 banks and credit cards around the world supported within our system — more than other sites, in most cases thousands more. The only requirement we have is that they provide one of the export formats we support (currently OFX, a.k.a. “MS Money,” QFX, a.k.a. “Quicken”, QIF, or OFC). We also make automatic downloads available to more people than ever before, using our Firefox Uploader, for the banks that support one of those formats. On top of that, we provide automatic currency conversion for all of the world’s major currencies — now over 180 currencies total.

But, there are still plenty of banks, credit unions, and credit cards around the world that we don’t yet list — either we don’t know about them or we just haven’t gotten to adding them yet. For new users, this means that they have had to write to our support line, and wait for us to add their bank. Often we do that in under one business day, but that’s still too long of a wait.

Now, that wait is gone. Simply by filling out a three-question setup form, any bank that supports one of our import formats can be added immediately.

For security reasons, a bank you add is only visible to you until we review and approve it. But, you can use it right away with either manual upload on the site, or in the Firefox Uploader.

I’ve talked before about why we’ve built our own data import system, rather than contracting out to a third-party data middleman service. One of the reasons I always mention is that building our own system allows us to control the results, and give you more control over your own data and experience by extension. This is another example of how owning that system allows us to provide you with better support — unlike other sites, we don’t have to pay anyone to add a new financial institution, nor do we have to outsource an update development process in order to laboriously add that support. In under a minute, you can add your own bank to Wesabe, and for almost any bank out there, you can automate your uploads with just a few clicks. No waiting. Full convenience.

We’re putting the finishing touches on some more new features that take even greater advantage of the data import system we’ve built. I’ll admit that building from the ground up has meant we’ve had some construction noise from time to time. But now that the foundation is solid and the walls are rising, you’ll find that Wesabe gives you the most control over your financial data, and the best choices for handling your private credentials so that you’re comfortable and secure. We can give you the best experience because we own it top to bottom, and we love seeing that pay off for you. I hope this helps.

The Wesabe Groups community is continuing to grow and provide better and better advice all the time. The “Paying It Off” group has passed 1,000 members, and the “Saving Up” group isn’t far behind. Here are just some of the highlights from the past couple of weeks:

Pay debt or continue building savings? in Paying It Off:

Based on personal experience and some of the things I read, I think that having a $1000 emergency fund is sufficient to cover most true “emergencies” (unexpected doctor bill, car accident, etc.). I would then take the rest of the money and throw it at the debt. No, you aren’t making money on the emergency fund, but that isn’t the point. If you turn to credit cards every time there is an emergency you defeat your efforts to pay down the debt. The emergency fund acts as a cushion that protects you from hitting the credit cards again. –ryanweb

Bills and accounts, together or separate? in Just Married! (or soon to be):

Congrats on having the separate checking accounts!! Having worked in financial institutions for years, I can’t tell you how many couples I’ve seen dig themselves a hole because they were doing their daily purchases off a joint checking account and somebody forgot to tell the other person what they were buying…and next thing you know it’s bounced check city. –nyle8720

Investing and the Sleep Point in Simple Investing:

I traded individual stocks for a few years and was constantly watching the market. Always had to have my stock ticker going at work. Was updating my portfolio trackers and spreadsheets all the time. Constantly scouring the investing forums I frequented…etc… Bleh…what a waste of time and of my life… I still don’t know to this day whether I ever did better or worse than average. Now I just do Index Fund investing at Vanguard. Occasionally I’ll rebalance when one of my asset classes gets out of wack, but honestly I probably only do that once or twice a year. I don’t watch the market daily…I only update my figures when I get the quarterly reports…etc… I just don’t worry about it anymore. –DRjunkie

$39,794.90 in Debt, but Make $240k in Paying It Off:

I once had the pleasure of working on a software project to “profile” customers for a mid-size regional bank. The idea was to try to gauge the income and spending habits of customers to separate them into distinct categories. These categories would then be used to determine what products and services customers would be offered. The most surprising thing that I learned while working on the project is that income really doesn’t have a whole lot to do with actual wealth. I can remember looking at the profiles of people who were earning $400-$500k a year with virtually no savings to show for it. The expenses these people had were incredible but they were literally living one or two paychecks from complete financial ruin. …and I also remember seeing profiles of people who looked to be earning less than $100k/yr but had accumulated massive amounts of wealth. Guess my only point is that high income doesn’t really make you wealthy or financially secure. As the OP suggests, it really only means you have a lot of nice toys. –mxmiller

Which profession(s) do you reccomend? in Saving Up:

Wow, the responses I’m getting are really great, thanks so much for all your inputs, they are truly helpful. I would just like to say that I think Wesabe has an incredible community filled with knowledgeable helpful people. Thanks again! –Valium

Tonight, we have two of those “You asked for it, you got it” features: you can now archive an old or inactive account on your account list, and you can view or delete any upload to an account.

If you close a bank account or credit card, you may not want to see it in your account list every time you login (especially since we prompt you to upload if the account hasn’t been updated in a while). To archive an account, go to the account detail page, click the “Edit” button at the top of the page (near the account name), and then click “Archive Account.” All of your transactions and tags for that account will be saved, and you’ll still see them in your reports, and on your tag and merchant pages. But, the closing balance will no longer be reflected in your accounts total, and you won’t have to see it cluttering up your list. If you need to look something up, you can get back to the account with one click on the “Show Archived Accounts” link at the bottom of the accounts list.

We also get requests to be able to see or delete uploads to an account. You can now do either of those by going to the same account edit pane (click the “Edit” button next to the account name at the top of the account detail page), and clicking “Manage Account Uploads.” There, you’ll see the date, Uploader version, transaction count, and date range for each upload, and you can click the transaction count to see what was uploaded, or the “delete” link to remove the upload from that account. If you’ve uploaded a statement to the wrong account accidentally, or if you want to track down when a transaction appeared, the upload management page can be a big help.

Hopefully these improvements make the site easier to use and make your accounts cleaner. Let us know what you think.