Payments Watch

You would like to track your spending, share your experiences with money, get help and help others in a community setting. You want to do this because you would like to make better financial decisions leveraging the experience of others. Welcome to the world of social finance - the web 2.0 version of personal finance tracking. There are several sites out there to help you achieve these goals. What follows are instructions on how to get started by setting yourself up on the popular Wesabe site.

Step 1: Sign Up

The first thing you have to do is go to the Wesabe site at http://www.wesabe.com and click on the big green Sign Up button/link (you can’t miss it). This will take you to Sign Up page. You need to enter the following:

• User Name: what you will use to sign into Wesabe from the main page. It appears that this name, in atypical login fashion, can contain spaces and other special characters.
• Public Name: this is the name other users will see (for example, if you add Tips or participate in the Groups (Groups being the discussion forums).
• Password: the word you will keep secret that along with your User Name will give you access to your accounts. I did not test to see if there are any restrictions here, most sites allow the password to contain letters, numbers and perhaps underscores (”_”). Spaces are usually not allowed and of course you want to pick something (malicious) people cannot guess which usually means a word bigger than six characters containing a mix of lowercase and uppercase letters and numbers.
• Confirm Password: type it in again (or better yet cut and paste). Of course if you actually type it in again, I suspect the page will tell you if what you typed the second time matches what you typed the first time which will at least let you know that you remembered the password you just made up.
• Zip/Postal Code: you can optionally enter your zip code, perhaps so that Tips and other advice can be tailored to your geographic location (???). I don’t know what the purpose of entering it is, so I just left it blank.
• Country: you can optionally choose your country from a drop down list. See my note on Zip?Postal Code above.

Next, there is a section on If you forget your password… with the following fields:

• Email Address: enter your email address! I assume that this is where they will send you your password if you have forgotten it (ok, I went to the sign in page and sure enough there is a link for Forgot your password? I clicked on it, and you get two options: you can enter your User Name or your Email Address. In both cases, Wesabe will send an email to the email address you registered with. The email Wesabe sends will contain a link which will take you to the Wesabe site where you will be asked your security questions. Answer them correctly and you’ll be able to reset your password).
• Security Question 1: you can pick a challenge question from the list, or make up your own.
• Your Question: you will only see, and get to fill in this question is you picked Write your own question! from the drop down list for Security Question 1.
• Answer: this is where you put the answer to Security Question 1 (or Your Question if that is the case).
• Security Question 2: see above.
• Your Question: see above.
• Answer: see above.

Once all the required fields are filled out, you click the Submit button. If there was a problem, the problematic field’s border will be red, and there will be a short message explaining the problem (e.g. “The password can’t be blank.”) beside the field. If everything is ok, you will be taken to the Welcome to Wesabe page. At this point you can do three things, Upload an Account, Browse Tips and Join Groups. Since you are a new user, let’s click Upload an Account so that we can start tracking your spending!

Setting Up a New Account

Assuming you have just signed up for Wesabe, you will be taken to the New Account page first. You have two options:

• Quick Start: This allows you to set up a new account from your browser, and will be the option that is described in the steps that follow.
• Live Updates: This requires the download and installation of software on your desktop which will automate the transfer of your banking transactions to Wesabe. This tutorial will not cover this approach.

Click on the link below Quick Start and you will be asked to choose the type of account you wish to add from a drop down list. Options include: Brokerage, Cash, Checking, Credit Card, Credit Line, Money Market and Savings. Once the type is selected you will be asked to enter the bank/credit card name (the field will autocomplete as you type and you can then simply select the financial institution from the list presented). For Cash accounts you can enter an account name and specify the currency. Click Next.

Now you will receive instructions to go your your online banking and download an account statement to your computer. The formats that will be supported by Wesabe are OFX, Microsoft Money, Quicken, QFX, QIF, and OFC. Once you have that file on your computer click Next.

You will now be given a field to specify where on your computer the downloaded account statement is residing. Clicking on the Browse button will give you the standard file selection dialog. Find the file and click Open. Once the file’s location is specified on the New Account page click Submit. Congratulations you are uploading your first set of transactions to Wesabe and you are nearly ready to track your spending! You will be presented with the Your Accounts page once the upload is complete.

Organize Your Transactions

Alright, you have set up a bank or credit card account on Wesabe. Now you have to clean up and organize your transactions’ data to make it really useful. The following video tutorial on the Basics of Editing & Tagging (also available on the Wesabe site) shows you how to do this. Why read when we can watch!:

Sometimes the organization of your transactions requires a little more detail than simply tagging them. For example, if you spend $50 at the liquor store and get another $100 cash back, how do you split out this $150 transaction? The following video on Advanced Tagging shows you how to split transactions using dollar amounts, fractions or percentages:

What’s Next

That should be enough to get you started and to start reaping the initial benefits of social finance. Since this is meant to be a tutorial on getting started with Wesabe, I will follow up in a separate post with comments on my own experiences and thoughts with getting started in Wesabe.