As a replacement to Mint.com, this package is the best I have seen so far, and I have been at this for the past 6 days of trial and errors.
Sure it takes a couple of days to learn and setup based on your needs.
Automatic download of your transaction from your bank accounts and credit cards allowed me to connect to all that I used.
Its Mint.com importing capabilities definitely cant be beat, simply save all your transactions from mint and fire up the import
But first you should create all the accounts using the same account name as defined in mint.
Don't bother with the categories, they will get created automaticaly, all that is left is to rearrange the hierarchy
JA
Jay
Dont waste your time and money
Spent so much of my time over months to organise the categories of my spend, adding rules etc as it seemed like a great product at the start.
It is a really good product, when it works - but the sync system is utterly lousy and unreliable. you could spend hours trying to figure out why something doesnt add up only to realise the sync just didnt download a bunch of transactions.
their customer service is absolutely shameful - they cant be bothered. my current sync issue has been up for a couple of months, and their position is 'well we'll let you know when it's fixed'. that's pretty much it. in the meanwhile, they are more than happy to continue charging my subscription fees.
what a complete waste of my time this product has been! would give them a score of zero if I could.
DH
David H.
Does Not Meet Real-Life Scenarios
Is not simple to use for real-life scenarios.
The of Transfer Transactions is set the same in both accounts. Not true in real life. Transaction are cleared and resolved at different periods.
Transactions which are resolved can be to easily edited.
Budgeting for a household takes some manual effort, with joint bills and joint accounts.
Have a joint account, I pay for some on my credit card and the transfer the amount from the joint account. Ensuring that only half of the transaction goes against my budgets and that my other half contributes is not easy, the balance of the joint account is only half mine.
AC
Anton C.
Useless software
Useless software. It would not sync with my credit union. After waiting three days for a response to fix my sync issue I finally deleted my account. Complete waste of time and effort.
IM
Iain M.
Synch system is constantly broken
Synch system is constantly broken and the customer service is less use than a chocolate teapot. I have been unable to use the system for over 3 months despite them taking a subscription renewal. The courts beckon as I am getting to answers from them. DO NOT SUBSCRIBE TO THIS USELESS PRODUCT.
JM
James M.
Pay for premium but get no service
I pay a monthly fee and have several accounts. Continually they are all just gone. Try to add them back, it asks me to upgrade to the plan that i already have. No response from company from multiple emails. Cutting my losses and running. BUYER BEWARE!
RS
RC-SWE
Overall a good experience, but could be "fairer" on pricing
First, let me start off by saying that I am generally satisfied with Buxfer. If you are a person that has accounts in different currencies, Buxfer is almost a no-brainer - so far it is the best of the bunch of the tools that I have tried. So far, there is only one account that it can't sync to. 15 out of 16 accounts isn't bad. It was the best result of all of the services I tried.
At the time of writing this, I have the Plus plan, which is the lowest plan you can buy. The others are Pro and Prime - more on those in a moment.
If you just want to have an overview via syncing and keep a basic budget, you can get by with the Plus plan. However, if you want to do any sort of planning, you quickly find you'll need the Pro plan at a minimum, which costs $1 more per month. The only real reason to move to the Pro plan is for the forecasting feature which lets you log recurring charges to keep an eye on them and help you budget better (e.g. those annual memberships for example). $1 more per month ($12/year) seems a fair deal for that additional feature (the other features of the Pro plan aren't all that special).
So if I am generally happy, why only three stars? It comes back to the plan pricing - and specifically the price-to-value ratio between the Pro and Prime plan. The difference between the Pro and Prime plan is an additional $5 per month ($60/year). What does prime give you? It gives you the ability to sync investment accounts, get backups of your data, and some other features (check the membership comparison chart on their website). I would argue that most of the other additional features aren't things which most will care about. My issue is that there are two features which they block off that should really be part of the Pro plan - if not standard:
* Investment accounts. To try and wall those off as a Premium++ service feels gimmicky and a needless money grab attempt. If investment account required a different API or unique technical connection I could understand. But they are just like any other account, so the distinction they try to make isn't very logical at all.
* Backups. Once you move to the Pro service, backups should really be included in that membership level. Again, to not have any backup available unless you pay $60/year is almost as much as any storage provider will charge you for their basic paid tier. And in fact, I would argue that the ability to backup your data should be included in every plan. I could understand charging extra if they were hosting your backup in the cloud, but they basically have just API'd this to send backups to your own cloud services (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, etc). It doesn't require them to hold any additional data beyond their production servers. Of course, being a cloud-based SaaS, they have to pay for all data transferred out, but it's really unlikely that any one account generates more than $5 worth of data per month because the information is text-based. One gets the sense that you could raise the price of the other plans $0.50 or so per month and cover that cost as standard.
The summary of this is that whilst I recommend Buxfer, I wouldn't recommend anything beyond the Pro plan until they stop blocking those two features behind the arbitrary Premium++ paywall. Even if they wanted to add another $1 to the cost of the PLUS and PRO plans to bring in these features, that's much more reasonable than what they are asking now.
I don't have a workaround for the data backup, so for now I just accept that will lose everything if Buxfer fails as a company.
For the investments part, my workaround to paying an extra $5 per month is to keep the majority of my investment account information in Mint because it's free! Sure, I no longer have absolutely everything in one place. But I can live with that. In fact, once you consider all of your retirement resources (especially pensions managed on the state/national level instead of by private companies), it's not likely Buxfer can get to those anyway so you have to do manual tracking or keep that information somewhere else. For $60 of savings per year, I can look across two screens on occasion and do a bit of manual tracking outside Buxfer.
So overall, yes I do recommend Buxfer. But just be smart about what you need from it and investigate if you can use a combination of their paid service and free service to basically get what you need.
If Buxfer were to do better matching between features and plan/pricing, this would easily go from three stars to at least four stars at least.
JT
James T.
Don't waste your time.
The sync interoperability is a key feature of this app and I find it has too many fails to be useful. Their customer support is next to useless. I have a paid subscription and definitely will not be renewing.