We have added some new and useful reporting tools to the Expense analysis page:

• Summary view
  
  The summary view gives you a quick snapshot of your financial situation. It shows your categorized income and expenses for the selected period, and also shows how your net worth has evolved during this time.
• Cash flow projections
  Financial planning is not just about analyzing your past spending, but being more proactive and planning out how the future is going to look like. To help you picture what the future has in hold for you, we have introduced the ability to project your net balance at a future point of time based on bill reminders setup by you.

  

Hope you like the new changes! :)

We released a new look for our analysis page, with bigger, intuitive and more interactive charts:

• The pie chart is labeled “in-place”, so you don’t need to roll your eye-balls over to another part of the page to figure out what tag a particular slice represents
• A bar chart beneath the pie chart shows the income v/s expenditure trend for the particular tag you want to dig into
• A slider makes it smooth to go back and forth in periods of time (For those who remember, this slider is a MUCH improved version of the one we had back in June last year.)

Analyzing and understanding where your money is going is the first step towards good financial health. We hope our analysis tools are helping you realize your financial goals, more efficiently than ever before.

A couple behind-the-scenes changes:

• Better duplicate detection: Our duplicate detection system is now much smarter. If you report transactions manually (e.g., from your mobile phones) and then sync your bank account, we will correctly identify the duplicates — even when the dates don’t match exactly! There’s also a “Find duplicates” link for those who want to inspect their accounts to search for old duplicates.

  This detection extends to our account transfer identification rules as well. If you mark a transaction as a transfer from account A to account B, we will go looking for a possible duplicate transaction in account B, and get rid of it automatically.

• Better summary reports: We have significantly enhanced our daily and weekly email reports to provide you with more in-depth and relevant information about your Buxfer account. Daily reports now provide a summary of your debts with your friends. Weekly reports provide you with a summary of your account balances as well.

We have upgraded our iPhone interface significantly taking it one step closer to being a complete first-class citizen. You can now perform arbitrary edits to your transactions. You can add and delete tags, accounts, budgets, contacts, etc. Most importantly, you can even auto-sync your bank accounts so you have your latest financial status available to you no matter where you go!

You will also notice that navigation (back-button) is much smoother and you don’t have to “back track” as much as you had to. Even more updates will follow shortly, but we must make sure we don’t destroy the simplicity and elegance of the interface.

We have also added an option for receiving weekly analysis reports — including the tasty pie-chart — for your week’s transactions. Just another tidbit to help you stay on top of your finances.

In other news, we are really glad our users are liking the enhancements and writing about it. Thanks, Aseem! To all our users - please continue to share your thoughts and feature requests / annoyances with us. Your feedback drives our product as much as our vision does!

Yesterday, we released a bunch of cool, new features which many of you had been asking for:

• Income analysis: In addition to analyzing where your money is being spent, you can also analyze how you are earning it. This feature is for the wealthy few who have so many sources of incomes that they want to analyze them :)
• Transaction splits: You can divide the total expense you incurred for a transaction in your bank statement across different tags. Especially useful for those supermarket purchases, where you buy a whole lot of diverse products (clothes, grocery, etc.)
  
• Tag import: Moving towards better, easier and more automatic categorization, we have compiled a list of popular tags alongwith keywords relevant for those tags. For example, the tag ‘Internet’ is associated with the keyword ‘comcast’, and will be automatically applied to any transaction matching ‘comcast’. As and when you enter new transactions (via manual import or auto-synchronization), we match your transactions with this list of tags and recommend relevant ones to you. You can also find the ‘Import tags’ link on the ‘Manage tags’ page listing all of your tags.
  
  The screenshot above shows some tags relevant to the transactions in my personal account, you will get personalized recommendations based on your transactions
• Amount search: You can type in a query like ‘amount:243.92′ to find all transactions with an expense or income of $243.92. Quite useful when you are trying to recollect what that age-old undescriptive transaction in your bank statement really was!

Enjoy! :)

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!

By popular demand, the trend line chart is back! In addition, you can view the trend lines for individual categories unlike in the previous incarnation. Enjoy!

We also made some performance improvements which should help Internet Explorer users considerably.

Update [19 Aug 4:07PM PST]: IE7 is working well, but IE6 is still suffering from some performance problems. We are working on this. Meanwhile, IE6 users: please consider switching to Firefox :)

Update [20 Aug 10:15AM PST]: Major problems (crashes) with IE6 have been resolved. We will keep optimizing until IE6 starts feeling very snappy.

One of the most loved features of our site are the expense analysis views. But, it did not quite provide our users the complete power to arbitrarily slice and dice their transactions. This showed through the sporadic emails that they wrote to us. And so, we went back to the design board and completely re-worked the expense analysis UI. Here’s what we’ve got:

Changes we made:

• We now utilize the full page height for showing the transactions, so you can see more than just a few transactions in each “view”. Some of you don’t like pagination much :) and we hear ya!
• For selecting periods, instead of the slider, you can now select an arbitrary start date and an (almost) arbitrary period to get the precise view you are looking for. Navigation arrows also take into account the period preference; this makes month-to-month navigation dead simple.
• In doing so, we did need to get rid of the beloved “slider”, which was quite an impressive piece of Javascript by itself! :( But, in our minds, usability comes first, beauty and technology, next!

We hope the new interface provides more power and better usability. Let us know how you like it. We are always all ears for anything and everything you have to say!

We have released a set of new exciting features.

Automatic categorization: Our users liked the pie charts, but that required pain-staking tagging of all transactions. We tried to reduce the pain with automatic tag rules, but that’s still work! Now we have moved one step closer to our goal of making our users do zero work. Buxfer now automatically classifies your transactions into hierarchical categories. We are continuously working to improve our categorizations. Meanwhile, if you feel unhappy with a category Buxfer has chosen for some transactions, you can always use tagging (and auto-tagging) to help get even better classifications.

Budgeting and deals: We’d like to help our users save money, not just track it. So, we’ve added two new features to the mix.

• Budgets: You can now create budgets on Buxfer. Tell us how much you’d like to spend on certain tags for a month, and if you go overbudget, we will send you an alert! Make sure you don’t spend $200 on coffee every month :)

• Deals: Everybody likes a bargain. And we know our users will be no exception. Buxfer now shows deals related to your transactions, so you know (a) whether you got a good deal on your purchase or not, and (b) how you could save on related future purchases. We make no money from any of the referrals - they are just there since we believe they will help users save money!

We hope you will find the new features exciting and useful. As always, don’t forget to let us know what we’ve missed! Oh, and you can now chat live with the Buxfer founders in case you think we’ve gotten slower with our email replies. :)

You asked for it, and now you have it! We released a bunch of tools for you to be able to understand your expenses, and drill down into your transactions to see where exactly your money is being spent.

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.

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.

There are more feature to be discovered, just play around with the tools and find out which one suits you the best. There’s more coming your way soon!