Fumblingly Tracking Expenses with Expensr

A while back I wrote about my ongoing search for the appropriate household budget management software:

So, we’re hoping for a nice lightweight, modern solution. I’ve done a bunch of searching, and many of the options feel very old and busted, or offer way, way too much functionality for what we need.

The closest I’ve found is Expensr, which offers just the right amount of functionality for us. It enables you to track and categorize expenses, and provides some nice charts to judge where your money’s going. That’s pretty much it, which is great, because that’s all we want.

There’s plenty of room for improvement, though. The most frustrating issue is that I get automatically logged out after a certain period. That’s not ideal, but it’s acceptable. What’s not acceptable is that they don’t provide any visual queues that I’m logged out. It’s only after I complete a bunch of fields in entering a new expense that they say “oh, by the way, you’re logged out, so we’re not going to log this expense”. Wasting a user’s time is a great way to lose users.

I’d also like their interface to be a little more robust, so that the the data entry and editing process was streamlined. They ought to customize a grid control (like, say, Nitobi’s) so that I can click to edit any field in any expense (much like the way you can edit any field in iTunes) without a popup.

Over at the Expensr blog, I see they’re promising some new features (including user-set currencies, which will be nice for ye olde Maltese Lira). In any case, they’re the closest fit to my expense tracking requirements, so I’m sticking with them for the time being.