Personal Finance Software - Xero Personal Shutting Down

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FlyingPete

112 posts

Master Geek

#128914 28-Aug-2013 10:53

Got an email from Xero this morning saying due to lack of demand they are killing their personal finance product. I signed up for this a couple of months ago and found it really useful and still getting it tweaked, so when I got an email saying they are shutting down in Nov 2014, I thought there is not much point continuing to invest time in it.

So what other options are out there that don't cost the earth?

NonprayingMantis

6434 posts

Uber Geek

#885761 28-Aug-2013 10:54

excel spreadsheet :P

thats what I use.

Inphinity

2780 posts

Uber Geek

#885762 28-Aug-2013 10:55

You need a budget.

billgates

4705 posts

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Trusted

#885769 28-Aug-2013 11:01

YNAB! It's not cloud based like Xero but it's cheap and works very well. Bank feeds can be imported via importing csv files.

http://www.youneedabudget.com/

Do whatever you want to do man.

FlyingPete

112 posts

Master Geek

#885770 28-Aug-2013 11:02

Used to use Excel, I still do have a budget still in Excel, was transferring it to Xero.

FlyingPete

112 posts

Master Geek

#885775 28-Aug-2013 11:05

Inphinity: You need a budget.

Funny I thought you were telling me that not making a product recommendation :)

ajobbins

5052 posts

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#885782 28-Aug-2013 11:11

There is another thread on this too, and this is what I posted there:

I had a big discussion with Xero recently about why it was an inferior product.

With the exception of BNZ Moneymap, none of the 'bank feeds' to Xero personal are direct bank feeds like they are for Xero Business, but rather are screen scraped from your internet banking via a third party service called Yodlee.

This obviously has security implications, as you are handing over your internet banking password over to a third party (An American company by the way - so who knows how what government agencies then have access to your banking), but also the user experience was terrible.

The feeds don't automatically refresh, and you have to manually do this upon login. If you have more than one account in Xero personal, you have to refresh each one individually - but not only that, you have to do them one at a time (Otherwise it tries to log onto your internet banking twice at once and your bank doesn't like this and starts killing sessions).

It was also taking sometimes 3-4 minutes to refresh - per account. So for me, I had 3 accounts set up and it would sometimes take upwards of 15 minutes after login to get all 3 accounts refreshed. And it was often missing transactions and about 2 days behind what I could see myself in Internet Banking.

I cancelled mine during the trial period, and gave all this feedback to Xero. If they had true bank feeds like the business ones I would see this as a valuable product and happily paid for it - but truth is, it was a terribly unusable and unsafe product.

Twitter: ajobbins

Inphinity

2780 posts

Uber Geek

#885783 28-Aug-2013 11:12

FlyingPete:
Inphinity: You need a budget.

Funny I thought you were telling me that not making a product recommendation :)

Hah, sorry, yes, I should've been more clear :)

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freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
79175 posts

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Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#885798 28-Aug-2013 11:45

Moved this to correct forum. There's a discussion on this already, it would be good if folks could please search or at least look at the frontpage when new topics are to be posted.