Brian Grey Blog

Times are tough, consumers are tightening their belts and the Web is here to help us manage our finances.

The folks at Wesabe just launched a tool to help me and my wife do just that — it’s called the “Cutback Tool”. So what do I think of the idea? Well on one hand, it may provide a more scientific way for me to encourage my wife that we don’t necessarily need to subscribe to say six home-related magazines (sorry Domino and ReadyMade, you’re probably on the cutting block!).

At the same time, however, the Venture Beat article describing Wesabe’s latest innovation cites an example from the CEO where he used the tool to decide he wasn’t getting value from his Netflix subscription and that maybe he should cancel it. Listen, I don’t need a “Cutback Tool” to tell me that I’m not getting my money’s worth from Netflix. All I have to do is look at the “Entourage: Season 3″ DVD that has been sitting around my living room since Thanksgiving to calculate who’s getting the best of that relationship.

But, here’s few thoughts on what will be important to users. (Note: despite my initial happiness with Quicken per the post on Quicken Online I did earlier, I am going to try out Mint on the advice of a friend).

1) Insanely easy to hook up all the accounts that matter — if I can’t simply wire in my bank accounts, investment accounts, credict card accounts, etc. easily and then manage everything in a simple UI then forget it.

2) Clear ability for me to track spending in any time interval — this is obvious, but Quicken struggles in presenting an easy way for your credit card purchases to be synced with your checking account payments so that you can easily get a snapshot of your spending in any time frame.

3) Fast performer and learner — none of us like keeping track of our finances, so patience is short going in. The service needs to be fast and always working, and it should “learn” from me so I don’t have to keep telling it how to categorize my payments.

I’m sure some people will want an iPhone app, a Facebook app, the ability to some how use Twitter in some crazy way to manage their personal finances, or some other cool features, but all I really need is somebody to nail the 3 points above so that I have to spend as little time as possible sitting in my home office on a Sunday night playing “family CFO”.

Finally got around to taking the burden of managing the family’s day-to-day finances off my wife’s plate. My inclination was to download Quicken’s software to my Mac and power ahead. But I took a stab at Quicken Online, and I have to say it was one of the more impressive web software experiences I have ever had.

(Here is an older CNET review and another review from blogger GetRichSlowly.org).

The set up was simple, the integration of my bank accounts (where I already have online bill pay wired in) and my credit card account (which covers the rest of the family’s transaction history) was also simple, and then the simple feature set made it easy to actually get caught up on our bill pay and current cash flow picture.

Sure, it’s a simple solution – it isn’t really set up to wire in to Quicken Software (yet!) and I don’t get sense it’s really set up to wire in my investment portfolio to become my ultimate financial web hub…but that’s clearly where the roadmap is headed. It is just super compelling to know you can access your info via Web wherever you are and via any device.