Personal finance tracking site Mint.com added a bunch of new budgeting and trending features today. Mint presents consumers with a financial dashboard based on spending and income data from their bank, credit card, and other financial accounts. It expanded its charts to include spending over time, income history, asset allocation, and net worth over time.
You can now plan for irregular expenses such as property taxes, auto insurance, or vacations. Budgeted items can be rolled over into the next month if they haven’t been used up, and Mint now figures out your income based on your paycheck. It takes all of this data and projects your savings or shortfall over time.
All of these new features will be appreciated by Mint’s 1.4 million registered (and 550,000 active) users, but they also point to a new direction for the site: bookkeeping for small businesses. Mint now has pretty robust reporting for personal expenses, income, and savings. These same tools could very easily be tweaked to help small businesses track costs, revenues, and profits.
All Mint needs to do is change the names of the categories, and add an invoicing feature to go after basic accounting sites like FreshBooks or Outright, which are in turn going after Intuit’s more fully-featured QuickBooks.
For entrepreneurs with limited time on their hands, the ability to track both personal and business finances in one place would have obvious appeal.
Still no UK support
…..give me an alternative to Quickbooks. Mint.com has a beautiful UI, is practical, and I would love to replace quickbooks with it. I’ve tried monkeying with it to try and use, but it’s just not robust enough…..yet
Can’t wait to ditch QB
Mint seems to become more useful every day. According to their founder, they’re planning on adding Airline & Hotel points and Cell Phone minutes tracking this year as well.
New features are pretty cool. But I’ll need UK support soon, and the ability to separate accounts and transactions by owner (for me and the wife).
I think that’s kind of a leap to make. I don’t think Mint really fits the bill for sending invoices, and FreshBooks isn’t a bookkeeping app. It’s a billing app, which is different.
I’m with you Vance. Mint’s good at making sense of the spending (not the invoicing which is a different end of the spectrum).
They still have a bit of work cut out for them though. Freshbooks has a pretty sweet invoicing, iphone app, and API.
What a great ad.
I’m still waiting for projections
Me too! I want to know how much money I WILL have….not how much I don’t have anymore.
If you want to know how much you will have, try Rudder. But, they only have automatic updates to top 10 or 15 US/Credit cards.
I’m with you – the past is only useful to the extent to which it predicts the future.
We’re working on something like this over at Thrive to show you, based on our planning section and your budgeting, when you will accomplish each of your goals in the short term (like saving for a vacation) and then what that does in the long term (we already show you how much you’ll retire with, for example; this will just add more accuracy to that).
Is this just an attempt at a sensational headline? There’s NOTHING in Mint’s new features that make it anything similar to FreshBooks now or in the future.
FreshBooks is invoicing, receiving payments, managing clients and employees. Those aren’t features Mint is anywhere close to offering.
Schonfeld is a total hack, you should know that by now.
Patrick, if Mint doesn’t add invoicing or bookkeeping features targeted at small businesses by the end of the year, I’ll send you a TechCrunch T-Shirt.
Can I get the T-Shirt if they do?
will you wipe it with your backside first?
Need support for dual logins (me and the wife) on one account
Double entry bookkeeping and other business management features aren’t something you can just bolt on.
WorkingPoint.com offers complete small business management in on easy to use place and is free to the owner for the life of their business.
So many accountants have Quickbooks tricked out with a ton of add-ons for them to do their work. Unless you do all the tax stuff yourself and don’t use an accountant, all these other sites will be useless until they can export an “accountant’s copy” of your data in QB format.
Sean, we agree which is why WorkingPoint.com exports account balances to .csv now which can be imported into QuickBooks for tax purposes.
WorkingPoint subscribers can export all their important data to CSV files.
Does Mint provide a way to enter the price paid for investments? It defaults to the performance based on when I signed up for Mint, but doesn’t really reflect the performance of my investments from the actual life of my investment.
Yes, navigate in the “Investments” tab to your holding, and then click on the amount in the “Price Paid” column. You can alter your cost basis there.
We’ll do proper tax-lot accounting in a future release.
Aaron Patzer, founder & CEO, Mint.com
Got it. Thanks very much!
Sounds like a great feature set. Due to lack of Canadian support, I am currently using justthrive.com, which seems to be more in a beta / development phase than Mint, but nonetheless works great. Hopefully the good people at justthrive are going to incorporate some of these features as well. They’re generally great with listening to user feedback. Especially the budgeting for irregular expenses seems a great idea. If Mint ever becomes available for Canadians, I’d be sure to give it a try, but every day, I’m starting to like justthrive more and more.
Glad you’re liking us, Wilco. As you note, we’re not as far along in our development as Mint, but we also simply have a very different focus: we’re in this to help people lead better financial lives. So rather than just giving you a pretty graph and pushing the marketing machine, we’re actually rolling out features that are designed to help people spend less, save more, and grow their financial lives.
Later this week, we’ll be showing off some new budgeting features and other improvements on the site, and we’ll keep listening to our users and doing testing to make sure that we’re providing the best personalized advice we can – stay tuned!
If i was Mint, i would start aggregating small business financial data and start advising them as they do for consumers on how to cute there spending. For example, if an small business in over paying or under paying for certain services. Or even better give small business a way to compare there business from other similar business. Small business will get a lot of benefit from this kind of data
THAT would make a LOT more sense for Aaron and company to pursue. Stick with what you know… just employ it in a different manner.
yes that is the way to go, stick to what you know don’t fight someone else fight until you run out of room for growth. I would kill for that kind of info. Imagine this.
lets say you are an e commerce company and half your expense is in shipping services, will it not be great to know how much others in your category are spending on shipping services. I would kill for that kind of info
FreshBooks handles primarily invoicing, not bookkeeping, and I see no reason to use Mint for business bookkeeping when there are a number of niche webapps that already do the same thing. Some of the even integrate with FreshBooks’ API and sync everything so you don’t have to enter stuff twice! Now that’s useful. I beta-tested one such service, IAC-EZ (.com), which works well for my side business. And unlike mint you don’t get ads, you get business reports, and it’s only $20/mo…not much more than an entry-level FreshBooks account. And it still does stuff like tagging like Mint does. Plus I’ve contacted Mint tech support, they took a long time to reply vs. the turnaround at IAC-EZ…customer service is the clincher and they’re even on Twitter and other social media too, right where I hang out often
maybe they can merge into “Minty Fresh Books”
Mint focuses on consumer spending and Freshbooks on small business billing. While their users may overlap ( i happen to use both), the use-cases are very different animals indeed.
It would be a big jump for Mint into a hyper competitive market, against one of the best companies out there.
Time will tell I guess
Ian Sweeney,
CEO billflo.com
Mint is not sustainable. People log in once or twice a month to check their finances. Cant give the stuff away by showing ads on that kind of traffic.
Case in point: people go to movies once or twice a month. So they pay for movies. People watch TV for many hours each day. So that is ad supported.
High-value low-frequency stuff cannot be supported through ads.
Hey aaron, it would be nice if we could gereate reports…monthly…yearly….mint doesnt seem to hold records beyond a 10 monthl rolling window…
Pankit, you should be able to run and export reports on as much data as you have in your mint account.
Please bring Mint to Canada!
I’ve been using Mint and Outright pretty much since they opened, but I don’t see the crossover just yet. It’s next to impossible to keep business and personal expenses separated on Mint right now, while Outright is geared specifically towards that.
Not saying I wouldn’t mind one less stop, but Small Business income is currently a huge headache on Mint.
Mint seems becoming useful day by day … Thats a good news for the founders
Mint is experiencing sharp decline in traffic.
Quantcast is showing sharp decline from 250K in Jan to 75K in June.
This trend will continue – as this space is not poised for radical change , especially not with what Mint has to offer.
They will have a small dedicated group of users, but growth on the consumer side has stopped, is declining and will continue to decline.