Mint.com

Be very careful. They have a dangerous Terms of Use, including:

• Limitation on liability, limiting all damage to $500
• Requirement of Binding Arbitration (prohibits taking them to court for any reason or participating in a group [class action]
• If you use their credit monitoring services, they will use that information for advertising

If they start charging random fees or they get hacked and your data is stolen, your rights will be limited by this agreement.

After using Mint for three months, here is my synopsis (on the Online version + the iPhone App):

(1) It only pulls in a small portion of the financial institutions description, so guess what - if your bank begins their transaction descriptions as Electronic Transfer or Paper Check, then this is all you will see in Mint. Frequent re-categorizing is painful. You cannot set up a rule to categorize because there are multiple vendors being paid by Electronic Transfer - the truncated description prevents there being enough info pulled to create a rule.

(2) The process is buggy; interfaces with banks are continuing to be negotiated. I understand that it may be in its early stages, but when Citibank suddenly renames their accounts and I end up with twice the accounts and transactions. PayPal and Bank of America also seem to have frequent connection issues.

(3) Most importantly for me, there is no way to link credits/debits (aka reconcile) your accounts. There is no way to say that a payment (aka credit) to your credit card statement matches / reconciles with the debit from your bank account. Like user hollash, I want to link transactions and reconcile my accounts.

I am very analytical by nature and taught Quickbooks for years. Mint has a cool interface, and the honeymoon period is exciting as you link your accounts and see the balances appear, then you realize that Mint has intimacy issues. For me it was not worth the continual effort just to see some pretty graphs.

Just added my accounts to Mint to give it a shot, and was shocked to discover that Mint does not provide a way to reconcile accounts. That means that all it seems to offer is an instant snapshot of your back data, which you could just as easly get directly from your bank web site. Most of the account management comes in as auto-categorization of expenses and related analysis. Basically, Mint provides account balances, not account obligations. If you want to track the fact, for example, that you have an outstanding $2000 check, then Mint can't help you.

It took them a year to make Mint.com available in Canada. Then they took a year to get all the banks connected. Now, it's been two years since the banks have been (mostly) taken care of, but you can't use goals because they aren't going to make it available up here.

Ever.

Sure, they say "we're planning to blah blah blah" but they have admitted there is no ETA and that they aren't even currently working on it.

And it gets worse folks. The very site I am writing this on, which is supposed to have alternatives, has no recommendations which are better suited to Canadian users. Hope you like inferior service.

It says right there in the details the name of the grocery store, but you list it as "Transaction". Can I automatically rewrite the name to something meaningful? No. Not unless I want to apply that same change to anything named "Transaction", which is everything.