Folks, one of our upstream ISPs (Savvis or Level3) is having a problem with their networks resulting in extremely slow network connections to Buxfer at least from California (and perhaps other places.) We have contacted our hosting provider about this. I hope you will be patient for the next couple days.

Update [Oct 08, 1747 PST]: Looks like the problem is resolved now.

Last Friday, we released a major upgrade to the way tags work on Buxfer. The overall goal was to make them a lot more powerful yet easier to use.

• Tags can be organized into folders, i.e., you can have one tag be a sub-tag of another tag. E.g., lunch might be a sub-tag contained within food. Organizing tags into folders lets you concisely and descriptively summarize your expenses in a way that you can easily understand. The ‘Expense Analysis’ tool takes into account the sub-tag relationships you specify, and lets you drill down into your expenses starting from broad top-level folders, to narrower tags.
• Automatic tagging has been greatly simplified. Instead of maintaining a separate list of auto-tags, you can simply attach a list of keywords to a tag which determine which transactions the tag will be automatically applied to.
• The entire process of applying tagging rules has been streamlined. First, when you add new transactions, applicable tagging rules are presented as recommendations, which you can customize right at the time of adding those transactions. Second, when you edit tags of already existing transactions, a small popup lets you convert the one-time tags into automatic tagging rules.

We tried our best to provide a smooth transition for existing users to the new system. If you encountered any problems due to the upgrade, do let us know!

We have enhanced the functionality that the history view provides you. The transaction history is probably the most accessed page of our application, and it sorely needed more functionality. So here it comes:

• Transaction description is shown in full. No more truncated descriptions with ‘…’ at the end. Transaction meta-data (i.e. account, tags, group) is presented clearly and separate from the other transaction details
• Most of the transaction fields can be edited in place with a click. In a snap, you can add tags, change the date, or switch the account to which the transaction belongs. Whats even better is that each transaction row has a ‘Actions’ dropdown which lets you access *all* transaction related actions in one click. You can edit, delete, settle, copy, print or repeat a transaction periodically … all in one click!

Hope you like it!

Manually downloading statements from your bank accounts and uploading them to Buxfer is a chore. So, Buxfer now supports automatic synchronization of your Buxfer account with that of your financial institution.

Of course, security is the first and most important concern. All Buxfer does is download your statements from your bank (as if you were downloading them) and then uploads them to your Buxfer account. We do not store your username, password or any other sensitive financial data ever. As such, you will need to re-enter your password everytime you synchronize your account. We believe this is a reasonable trade-off at this stage between convenience and security.

This feature is in an early BETA phase; so we only support very few financial institutions right now: Bank of America, Citibank credit cards, US Bank and American Express credit cards. We hope to expand this rapidly to cover a wide range of financial institutions.

If you’d like your favorite financial institution to be supported soon, please contact us. The institutions which we support first will largely be determined by the requests we receive from our users. Also, if you are a programmer who has already written a “downloader script” for your bank, we’d love to incorporate it within our infrastructure if you so wish.