Review of Free Online Money Management and Budgeting Tool: Yodlee MoneyCenter (moneycenter.yodlee.com)
Rating: 
Pros:
- Free
- Automatically import your accounts (including my credit union account!)
- Calendar spending view (this is my favorite feature!) Helps show when I’m spending money, not just totals.
- Excellent reporting for spending, expenses, budget vs actual spending
- Import real estate, investments, rewards accounts, manage net worth
- Share account feature that allows you to show limited information to other users (such as your tax accountant)
Cons:
- Slow loading time
- Hard to navigate, not very intuitive user interface
- Pay bill feature doesn’t have a lot of bill payers, doesn’t allow payees that aren’t already in thier system
- When you re-categorized a transaction, you can’t easily save that category setting for the future
Yodlee Calendar
I was initially impressed with Yodlee MoneyCenter based on the amount of investment and account options that you could manage in the interface. However, a certain key feature that Mint had is lacking in Yodlee. As I mentioned above, if a transaction is imported in as un-categorized or had the wrong category, I can re-categorize it. In order to have similar transactions categorized correctly in the future, you have to create a rule in the “custom categories rules” tab. For me, this would involve a lot of going back and forth that I’m unwilling to do.
My Choice:
Although I love the calendar spending view chart, I have decided to use Mint for the simplicity and ease of use with importing my account information and trending. It has a few less options than Yodlee, but overall meets my immediate needs for budgeting. I recommend you give Yodlee a try if you are looking for a lot of features as mentioned above in my Pro list, and Mint or Thrive for a something a little more user friendly.
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