Banks or credit card statements are filled with (mostly irrelevant) junk surrounding the main description or payee. And even if we allow you to set automatic tags and get classification done properly, it’s still an annoyance to see those ugly descriptions lying around. Plus, editing every single one is a pain.

No more.

We have added support for easy automatic renaming of transaction descriptions. To get rid of all transactions which look like

CHECK PUR SAFEWAY STORE#12188989 SUNNYVA CA

just set up a rule which says

rename transactions matching SAFEWAY STORE to Safeway

and be done with it!

We just released a brand new mobile interface for Buxfer, which provides offline access to your data with the help of Google Gears for mobile. So you can access Buxfer from your mobile device even when you are not connected to the internet! If you are always on the go, and hate to go online just to check your bank balance, then this is just what you have been looking for. Just point your browser to:

 http://m.buxfer.com 

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality. Today, Google released a version of Google Gears for the Windows Mobile platform, and we are glad to launch our offline mobile app in collaboration with Google. Support for more mobile platforms is in the works.

In online mode, the mobile interface lets you access your bank account balances, transactions, and analysis charts. You can add/edit accounts, transactions or tags. You can even synchronize your bank accounts right from your cellphone! More features should be coming your way shortly …

In offline mode, you can access all the above features in a read-only mode. You won’t be able to add new transactions or edit your tags, but you can still view your account balances, recent transactions and analysis charts.

We are very pleased to announce that you can now access your Buxfer data and analytics programatically with our REST API.

So, what can you do with the API?

• You can create a widget to automatically update your account balances on your desktop every 15 minutes. Simply send the following request periodically and you are done!
  

  https://www.buxfer.com/api/accounts.xml

• Perhaps, you want to look at your analysis pie chart, but you want to restrict analysis to your credit card account. Just type in the following and out comes a pie-chart! Tweak the URL to your heart’s wish, and get near-instanteneous analytics!
  

  https://www.buxfer.com/api/analysis.html?accountName=Mastercard

  

• Mash up your financial data with other services out there on the web! In the previous example, we used Google’s Chart API to produce compelling visualizations. You can do so with tons of other services to create useful tools.

So get creative and start hacking!

Need more info?

• Read the API overview
• Understand the security issues
• Dig into the complete documentation
• Get started with sample clients in Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP.

Like all things, we think this is only a first step; please let us know whether you can build interesting applications using the API. If not, let us know which API calls you would like to be added, and which cut out to keep the API lean.