Yodlee Gives a Big Picture View of Finances
When I find something that I can happily and eagerly recommend, it is a Good Thing. Today’s good thing I speak of is Yodlee.
What is Yodlee?
Yodlee is a company that powers bill paying and aggregation services and technology. The implementation of Yodlee technology at LowerMyBills.com’s free BillPay Plus service, for example, enables LowerMyBills to pull account data from over 8,000 sources (including billers, brokerages, banks, credit card issuers, insurance providers, lenders, travel agents, email providers, etc) so you can view your bills and account data online and pay them from one site instead of hopping around to multiple sites.
If you do any sort of online bill payment, there is a good chance you are already touching a Yodlee technology. Check out a few of these on the impressive list of companies using Yodlee: AOL BillPay, Bank of America, Citigroup, E-Trade, Equifax, JP Morgan Chase, Merill Lynch, Microsoft Money, MSN BillPay, Quicken.com and Wachovia.
“So what?” you say?
Yodlee has OnCenter, its own free aggregator on their website so you can see an awesome overview of your financial picture. Browse their list of accounts and if you have a website login for one they list, enter your login information to instantly add it to your OnCenter page. Click a button and it will update all of your account data on demand. It emails you alerts to new bills, lists upcoming bills, bill due dates and current balances. You can even add in an account for the equity on your home and cars so you can see your overall net worth. Spiffy, huh? Also available for aggregating are rewards accounts and miscellaneous sites like Evite.com. Sites like Evite do not offer you a balance to keep track of, but Yodlee doubles as a nifty way to access multiple sites with a single username and password.
Below is the tiniest screen capture you’ve ever seen. (Don’t my finances look great from here?) If you want to actually see something, then just click on image to get the jist of what the Yodlee OnCenter website can do. Hopefully, blacking out most of my info doesn’t make it too difficult to see what Yodlee OnCenter has to offer.
[NOTE: If you use Internet Explorer and the image is very small after clicking on the above link, you might need to mouse over the bottom right-hand corner of the image to show a box that will resize the image to full size instead compressed to one page.]
Available Modules:
- Alerts - The Alerts module allows you to receive reminders and warnings pertaining to your financial transactions and holdings
- Bill Reminders - View bill reminder due dates and transactions with your bill payment service
- Email - Preview recently-received email messages across all your email accounts
- Expense Manager - Track your daily expenses and payments across all of your banking and credit card accounts
- Net Worth - View all of your assets and liabilities, across categories and financial institutions
- News - View news headlines from your favorite sources
- Other Accounts - Access securely stored login information for online calendars, travel reservation sites, shopping sites, and more
- Portfolio - View all of your investment holdings across multiple institutions
- Rewards - View all of your rewards balances and securely store your login information
Is it secure?
If you are going to be trusting all of your logins and passwords to a company, you need to know it is secure. Take a look at Yodlee’s security policies. Many of your financial institutions trust them enough to implement their technologies because they are reputable.
To Yodlee or not to Yodlee, that is the question
I vote to Yodlee.
I love being able to see all of my accounts at a glance. It is exactly what I liked about Microsoft Money (sans Microsoft’s botched-up implementation of Yodlee in their last product.)
If having your money and bills all over the place drives you mad, Yodlee OnCenter is definitely worth checking out.
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April 4th, 2006 at 10:38 am
When all is said and done, it looks a lot like my Moneydance interface, except Moneydance also lets me play with my budget and maintain future value figures. It’s an interesting real time look though.
April 4th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Yeah, I love the real time of it all and it was so easy to setup. They had my mortgage company, every single credit card company I have and all of our retirement accounts. They even can pull from Checkfree, Sharebuilder and our car insurance company.
In Microsoft Money 2005, they had all the bells and whistles I liked but the Yodlee implementation was so messed up, it would duplicate transactions and was effectively useless. I was so annoyed that months after the Money 2005 release and the supposed fixes that didn’t fix anything, I gave up.
Now that Money 2006 Deluxe is free after rebate, I might pick it up again and see if they fixed everything that went so wrong in 2005. My independent budgeting is fine and has been for years. I’m just not sure how much money micromanagement I need beyond seeing the historical charting Yodlee does and the real-time data (the most important part to me). All the other stuff is just nice, but not necessary in making sure my bills get paid.
April 4th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
It seems to me the only item missing is my car loan (through Honda Financing Corp). Unfortunate, but I was able to add a custom account.
April 4th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
I also use MoneyDance. I do not like the idea to give Yodlee all my passwords. I know that they are very secure but what happened if somebody arrives on my personal pages by mistake? Everything is there….
I’m looking for something like MoneyDance with an online interface: you can upload your QIF, OFX files but you don’t need to give your passwords.
April 4th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
Are you talking about someone internal to Yodlee “arriving on your personal pages” or a logged in browser? Since you said by mistake, I’m assuming you mean a logged-in browser.
Yodlee autologs people out after 14 minutes. It’ll pop up a window for 1 minute to allow you to select continue but you can only do that once. If you have another 14 minutes of idle time, you’re logged out immediately.
If Yodlee isn’t secure, then we’ve got a larger problem in that many companies use their technology in their bill presentment and payment implementation.
April 4th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
I missed the last part of your post. You’re looking for something like MoneyDance with an online interface where you can upload to it.
There’s MSN Money but it doesn’t meet your criteria of being able to upload, from what I can tell. The full version of Microsoft Money syncs with MSN Money and you can import your data into that and not use the Yodlee stuff in Money. Quicken probably has the same thing, although I did see lots of mention that Quicken.com implements Yodlee. I’m not sure if they’re using it for something unrelated to the money management software.
I’m drawing a blank for the big-name companies for financial management software for individuals. I’ll have to look around and see what’s out there. Now I’m curious about online tools for uploading data.
April 7th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Moneydance runs just about the same way as Quicken and Money in terms of connections to various institutions and creating direct connections. It uses OFX technology and has full support. If you need Moneydance support, go to the Moneydance support forums at their website support section.
April 7th, 2006 at 9:53 am
In terms of Moneydance with an ‘online interface’, you’re probably looking for Quicken online.
Note, you’re also putting all your financial information in a website here and it may or may not be just as secure as Yodlee.
March 15th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
[...] Keeping this list in my master finance spreadsheet helps me to keep my priorities right in front of my face. I look at it daily. I also have as much of this as possible in Yodlee, which is an awesome tool to monitor your accounts. I need to keep this as a constant reminder in front of me because otherwise, it’s so very easy to slip up and forget something. Even though I have most everything on my list automated, I really need a constant reminder that they exist. [...]