Today I saw a review on The Next Web about how Yunoo received the people’s choice award. Well, nice. Remember I said I would be trying it? I kind of gave up after a while, firstly because it was in dutch only and secondly because I absolutely hated downloading my transactions from the ABN website into a *.TAB format and then importing it into Yunoo.
Well, after checking out a couple of “financial and savings” sites, Yunoo was still the best bet.
- Mint.com was US-Banks only (It looked the MOST promising)
- Wesabe.com had some Dutch banks but it required a firefox plug-in and it always crashed mid-way and I never really got to see the imports
- There were also other things like Quicken-online, Yodlee which website did not appeal to me, so I decided screw it
So back to Yunoo. Quite unfortunately, unlike US Banks, Dutch banks did not have an API to connect directly, probably safer as well. However, this results in having to import your transactions which to me, was kind of a pain to do. Importing was fantastic though, because it did everything in an incredibly sleek way, although I did not know why my numbers did not add up. But since I was too tired to translate to English I gave up after 5 imports. (If you want an accurate number I think you need to import from the beginning of time).
However, once you get over the painful importing, the nice part comes, if you know Dutch that is. With your bank transaction, you are able to check and tag groceries (boodschappen), rent (huur) and everything so that you have an overview (overzicht) of what you are spending each month. Its sweet to see those figures, and it also made me realise how much money I was actually spending on eating out.
Anyway, Yunoo is really promising, and I even saw that some founders were actually from the university near here. However since it is in Dutch, not everyone can try it now, so wait for the localization. And you either enjoy the downloading the transactions (or not) because of the privacy (you don’t pass your passwords and the works to anyone). For me however, after searching through these budgeting things, I actually came out with another solution. Its called Cha-Ching, and I will review that in a bit as well.
