Sunday night, I tried out Yodlee. It’s an excellent finance managing service, has a nice interface and it feels easy to use. I’m going to review this free online service and discuss its features.

Registration
It was pretty easy. Just your generic website registration process which takes just minutes to complete. After filling out the fields, click on the confirmation link inside the email you’ll receive.

Design
It’s a pretty similar interface to BofA’s My Portfolio. It’s not flashy and web 2.0 looking like Mint.com, but I like its simple layout. It’s easy to figure out where all of the features are. There are a lot of drop down menus to change the settings of what you’re looking at, which is always nice since it allows you to narrow down what kind of transaction or spending you want to review.

Features and Flexibility
You’re going to see a lot of features that are in BofA’s My Portfolio. I won’t go into detail on all of the features since you can see them on the screenshots, but instead I’ll mention extra features that makes Yodlee user-friendly.

Once you login, you’re redirected to the Accounts Overview’s Account Summary page, but Yodlee has an option to let you change it to another page. I had changed mine to the Dashboard, which is a page that shows you net worth, bill reminders, and transactions, as well as many others which I disabled through the Customer Care page.

Unlike Mint.com, I didn’t have trouble adding ING Direct as an account, and I was able to add FNBO Direct as well. Adding all nine of my accounts took me 10 minutes at the most.

A nice feature is the Yodlee FinancialCaldendar. The name is self-explanatory, the tab shows you a calendar with the days your bills are due.

Conclusion
Yodlee is My Portfolio plus extra features. The extra features aren’t something that would make me choose it over My Portfolio convincingly, but they are still nice. It’s kind of like Quicken with similar features. Like Mint, some of the transactions were mislabeled but that’s something I can’t blame on Yodlee. The labeling system is very slightly off but it’s smart enough to label all of the unknown transactions as Other Expenses, so I can go back and fix them. The rest of the transactions were accurate.

So far, I like Yodlee better than Mint so far even if Mint has a nicer layout. It’s got more features and more flexibility. I’m still going to use BofA’s My Portfolio because although Yodlee and Mint both have neat features that My Porftolio doesn’t have, but they aren’t enough to make me completely change my mind.

I recently tried out Mint.com because I wanted to take a look at this free web-based financial management service that won TechCrunch’s Best Presenting Company award. Bank of America’s My Portfolio does the exact same thing except it doesn’t have as big of a list of credit card, bank, savings, investment accounts you can choose from.

Mint is very easy to use. Registration took me less than a minute and to add my bank and credit card accounts, it took a short time as well. Although, it didn’t have FNBO Direct for me to choose from, I’m going to give it a test run and share with you guys.

Let’s start off with some screenshots:
Click for a larger image.

At first glance, you can see that Mint has a very nice interface that is user-friendly and easy on the eyes. Mint has five tabs that display your financial status and other useful information.

Overview: This tab give you how your money is allocated, your total assets, you debt, extra ways to save on your current financial situation, budget, and reminders of when and what is due. You can get a general idea of how your finances are being used from this tab alone.

Transactions: It’s self-explanatory. Here you can find all of your transactions for the past 30 days or so. This tab will give each of your account its own tab where you can take a look at which card is/was used for what. You can also edit your transactions for more accuracy.

Spending Trends: With this tab you are explained how and where you spend your money. It is pretty detailed and I found most things to be accurate. A little bit of inaccuracies in labeling some miscellaneous transactions doesn’t affect things much. You also get a pretty pie graph and some bar graphs as well for monthly spendings comparisons.

Ways to Save: This is the coolest part of Mint. I knew my Citi Diamond Preferred card wasn’t the best one for me so I had already decided on switching to Citi Driver’s Edge card before I had even heard about Mint. As soon as I finished updating my accounts, Mint recommended that I make the same decision regarding my Citi card! Pretty cool. It gave me a short detail about why I should and how much I could be saving. Excellent.

Accounts: Here is where you can add your bank and credit card accounts. The process is simple and fast. I found it to be pretty reliable. It’ll automatically alphabetize your accounts next time you visit this tab.

Overall, I like this application. It does what Quicken and MS Money can without having to purchase them. Although it’s not as powerful as those softwares are, it does give you the basic needs to manage your bank and credit card accounts. And the additional information it gives is always helpful. It may not have as much flexibility as Quicken, it’s still a pretty good application for being in its beta release.

Although I won’t be using it as my main finance manager, I don’t need to because I just use My Portfolio, and Mint won’t let you add FNBO Direct as an account, I will use it for its extra goodies.

Using Quicken can be overwhelming at first, but this is easy to get use to right off the bat. If you don’t want to be overwhelmed by the fully feature loaded softwares like Quicken, try out Mint. I like concept of this application and will be looking forward to its upgrades and improvements.

Commentary: Strangely, I haven’t run into the issues the blogger at SavingWithMe.com has. Maybe he’ll have better luck with Mint’s final release.