Next month, Matt Kersten will be up to his neck in Christmas cards. The founder of Kersten Cards, a Scottsdale, Ariz., greeting card company, says 80 percent of his 4,000 orders per year are Christmas cards, which typically hit between July and early December. That leaves fully half of the year with minimal orders--and scant new revenue.
"It's definitely tough, but we do it," he says. "It's important to manage costs, and you constantly have to reinvest in your business. You can't stay stagnant."
That balancing act is one that most seasonal businesses face, says Dexter P. Morgan II, founder of MFS Consulting, a Newport News, Va., management consulting firm specializing in small businesses. "The seasonal business, regardless of size, needs to save money and resist the urge to spend when flush with cash," he says.
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Mint.com has earned a great reputation in the US for its online money management tools, allowing users to keep track of their finances in real time via web-based and mobile apps. The problem? It’s only available to US residents. Stepping in to solve this problem, at least for the UK, is Money Dashboard.
After several months in private beta, the service opened to the public this week. So, should you sign up? We’ve given it a roadtest and here’s what we think.
Getting set up
In order to use Money Dashboard you’re going to need to have Microsoft Silverlight installed. This is a pain if you use a non-supported browser (we had problems with Chrome on the Mac, even though Money Dashboard assures us it is supposed to work) but Money Dashboard’s Dave Riley tells us that they opted for Microsoft’s proprietary technology as it allowed them to provide a good looking, secure, cross-platform experience.
Once you’re set up, it’s time to add your various bank accounts. You do this by entering your internet banking login for each account. While this can feel a little disconcerting, Money Dashboard uses the same system, Yodlee, that Bank of America, PayPal, Mint.com and even Fort Knox use to secure their financial information. More details on how that works here.
Keeping track your finances
The benefit of services like Mint and Money Dashboard is that they visualise your financial activity in ways that make budgeting incredibly easy. Being web-based they’re much more convenient than traditional personal finance software like Quicken, too.
Money Dashboard’s UI is split into four screens which you can click left and right between using some fancy Silverlight-powered animation. To the left of this is a ’speedometer’ showing graphically how your finances are doing.
Your Dashboard shows the latest transactions, while ‘Set Budgets’ allows you to mark an amount of money that you want to try to limit yourself to for different type of spending. Savings, investments, groceries, gadgets and travel are among the suggested things you can set budgets for, although it’s completely customisable. If you want to budget your spending on doughnuts and iPhone apps that’s completely fine.
How does Money Dashboard know what you’re spending on each type of item? Tags. The ‘Tag Your Transactions’ screen allows you to apply, for example, a ‘Rent’ tag to the direct debit that goes out to your landlord every month. The service does quite a good job of auto-tagging many transactions based on their descriptions but you will probably have to spend some time tweaking the tags to get them exactly as you want them. It’s important to set tags as that help with your budgeting; it’s hard work at first but it will pay off in the long run.
Finally, ‘Track Spending’ shows a graph comparing how you’re doing this month with the budgets you’ve set yourself. This is a hand ‘at a glance’ look at whether you have money to burn or whether it might be a good idea not to splash out on that new MacBook Pro this month.
Alert!
Alerts are potentially the most useful part of the service for many users. Money Dashboard has an alert and messaging system that you can set to send out an SMS or email when your bank balance drops below a set amount, you’ve overspent in one category or when it’s time to pay a bill, among other things.
Monetisation
Money Dashboard is monetising its service via the ‘Ways to save’ section. If you do find yourself overstretching yourself, you’ll find advice on saving money along with affiliate links to insurance websites and the like.
Conclusion
Money Dashboard has made a strong start in providing an alternative to Mint.com for the UK. Plans for the future include mobile apps later in the year. We’d like to see more graphs and charts of how our money is doing added into the service too, but then we’re suckers for data visualisation.
The personal finance data market is set to grow over the next few years and Mint.com’s owner Intuit is likely to expand the service beyond US shores sooner rather than later. Money Dashboard will have to keep an eye on emerging competition like this, while also bearing in mind the fate of a similar service, Kublax, which was serving the UK market until it went belly-up earlier this year after experiencing funding difficulties.
Money Dashboard is showing a strong start here. They’re definitely a name to watch as they develop. The product is still in beta and the company is encouraging users offer feedback by getting in touch via the company’s user forum on their website.
surface master
A lot of people are struggling with finances these days. There are a lot of reasons to blame for this including lack of employment, rising prices, and the current state of the economy. One of the biggest problems though, is that a lot of people do not budget their money. When you Budget your money it has a lot of advantages. The main advantage is that you get a better understanding of where your money is going when you spend it. The best way in my experience to budget money is to do so visually. By this I mean with pencil and paper, or my favorite method which is the computer.
I've made a budget for my-self using Microsoft excel and I find it to be very useful. Excel makes it easy to create a budget because you can utilize the formula feature to make any necessary calculations to give a better understanding and view of your money.
When starting an excel budget, the first thing that you want to do is to create a tab with your income information. You want to include things such as days and hours worked weekly pay, monthly pay, yearly salary, and any other sources of income. Then you should create a tab for each month and on those tabs, list your income for the month and then start to list any expenses that you may have. You can choose how in depth and accurate you want your budget to be by what you include in your list of expenses. Some people chose to make a budget for bills while others such as my-self opt to include bills as well as any additional expenses such as groceries, toiletries, apparel, and other personal spending.
Set up formulas to automatically deduct any and all monthly expenses from your monthly earnings and you'll have a more accurate count as to what you'll have left for the month to either save or spend on other things that you may want. Doing this will allow you to be more responsible with paying bills and designating your money properly.
I hope this helps everyone! Happy spending!
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