Last year, when our home briefly went without Microsoft Windows in our unsuccessful Mac experiment, one of the applications I had the most difficult time replacing was Microsoft Money. I had been using it for 3+ years to track our net worth and experiment a little with budgeting. I tried using Quicken for the Mac, which came installed with our MacBook, but it was a big step backwards. It was far more tedious than MS Money. I wanted to make my life easier and spending 50% more time balancing our accounts and tracking expenses was not the direction I wanted to go.
Enter Wesabe.
I was an early adopter for Wesabe, but hadn’t really used my account since I had first signed up. When I took my second go at it, the user community was much larger, and thus the benefits of social collaboration were more apparent. For example, entering data was a snap because over half of my merchant ids — which I see on my transactions — had already been cleaned up.
Last week, they made another step forward in building value on top of their user data: better merchant reviews. Tying transaction amounts to reviews ties together two data points in a unique mix that vastly improves their recommendation engine.
I have not done much rating on Wesabe until now, but I will start to contribute now that I see the value I can get out of this community tool.
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