Transactions in your bank or credit card statements which are actually account transfers show up as expenses (sometimes in multiple accounts). Its quite a hassle to manually mark each one of these transactions as an account transfer. Last night, we released a feature which gets makes this a lot easier:

• Mark as account transfer: The ‘Actions’ menu for each transaction contains an action to quickly edit a transaction into an account transfer
• Automatic account transfer detection: You can automate the rule for detecting account transfers. For example, you can set up a rule which says

  always mark transactions matching ATM Withdrawal as transfers from my Checking account to my Wallet

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!

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! :)

For those who can’t automatically import data from their bank into Buxfer, we have added the ability to manually reconcile transactions with your bank statements. Just enter your expenses as they happen, and with a few clicks, reconcile them at the end of every month.

To reconcile your transactions, simply select them one-by-one using the checkboxes, and then hit ‘Reconcile’ (as shown in the screenshot below)

In addition to reconciling, you can also set a transaction’s status as pending, so that it doesn’t contribute to the net balance, or net expense in your Buxfer account. This is very useful if you want to track expenses which take a long time for your bank to clear. If you write a lot of checks, this feature is just for you!

Hope you like the new features :)

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!

To err is human. To accidentally delete “stuff” is even more human. To make you think before you delete, most software ends up asking the annoying “Are you sure you want to delete this?” pop-up. Problem is, quite often, you realize your mistake only when it is much too late.

The solution we have adopted is to provide an “undo” facility for deletion. Now, you can undelete your transaction any time. Even if your friend accidentally ends up deleting a transaction, you can undelete it and send him a polite note telling him about the mistake!

You can view your “trashed” transactions by clicking on the little “Trash” icon on your Transaction History page.

We hope this keeps the common case (no misunderstandings / mistakes) annoyance-free (no pop-ups) and yet provides an insurance when things go wrong. There are a couple more places where Buxfer needs to provide an “undo” facility - we will add that soon.

Yet another of those commonly requested features is now available. You can now change the group of a set of shared expenses - useful when you or your house-mates forget to apply a group to some of the transactions.

You can also settle a bunch of transactions in one fell swoop.

Hope this will make manipulating shared transactions much easier!