BudgetPulse is a money management website that could be a great way for you to report and budget based on all your Canadian accounts. It’s actually something that they DON’T do that makes it work so great for Canadians looking to track and forecast their personal expenses.
I’ve previously written about other websites like Mint, Quicken Online and Wesabe. A common complaint with all of these have been either no or little support for Canadian banks and credit cards. This is because these websites use your log-in credentials to pull data from financial institutions. While some support the major Canadian banks (but not credit unions and many credit cards), other will not allow you to even sign up.
There is another issue related to these sites logging into your financial information. While it can be convenient, it’s quite a security risk for one site to hold your passwords for every financial product you have.
However, BudgetPulse has neither of these problems since they do not sync to your banks and credit cards. It’s a simple online money application. You enter your income and expenses and create reports, budgets and goals. You can either enter the information manually or import it from MS Money, Quicken or data files that you can download from your bank’s website.
Then you are able to manage your transactions, budget with handy sliders and set savings goals. Savings goals are interesting since not only can you work towards your own objective, you can share it with friends or family and they can contribute towards your goal. There are also charts and graphs that can give you different perspectives on your financial situation.
A new feature they recently launched is online fundraising for non-profit organizations. This shows your goal and how far you have come to completing the goal. People can contribute by PayPal, Amazon or pledge to pay money.
So give BudgetPulse a try if you want to get your own finances reported in one place, which can be a great way to find expenses to cut and save more of your money.
- The Many Benefits of Business Credit Cards.
- Pros and Cons of Credit Cards
- Is Credit Card Debt Ready To Explode?
Related Posts:
Thank you for the review of our budgeting software and our new online fundraising function. This came as a result from requests from our users and we are happy to give it to them. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to contact me.
Craig Kessler
Marketing Director at BudgetPulse
craig@budgetpulse.com
Thanks! This will be really helpful. I’m going to try it out and see if it has features that will work with my goals.
I found similar issues with the other online budgeting tools, so I’m happy to hear this one may work for Canadians.
Almost what I want.. I’d like to see a web based portfolio management. Maybe its just me, but the current offering just don’t seem to be keeping up with the usability trends of new web apps.
So wheres the downloadable version that doesn’t require me to dump all my personal data in an consolidated online storage ripe for marketing spam and privacy infringement? Yes, it says in the privacy policy that they will not do that however it also states that… “We may modify the content to this Private Policy and have the right to change it at anytime. The new updated Private Policy will take into affect right away and by accessing BudgetPulse, you agree to adhere by the changes made. Please review this Private Policy for updates.”
Not quite as bad as giving them all your logins and password for your financials but but theres no way in heck I’m dumping my info into a website.
I have visited your two sites Mint and quicken online and found them quit informative, before reading this i thought all the companies which are demanding our bank details and social security number can be harmful for us, thanks their is a company in Canada which is providing such a great services, thanks for updating us.
@Crucial The data is stored in a cloud storage but the data is just that, numbers. For example, even if someone was to break into my account, they would see Account A has $xxx. Because it is manual and just numbers the categorization could be anything and numbers mean nothing to anyone looking, if that worst case scenario was to happen. We have no intentions of selling of any data, it wouldn’t do any good because the user sets the category, we would not even be able to decipher it. If you have any more questions, feel free to contact me at support@budgetpulse.com.
Craig´s last blog ..Personal Finance Twitter Chat on Wednesday Dec 9th
Thanks, very helpful! Since Mint is yet not available for Canadians, I think BudgetPulse can be a great alternative.
The only restrictions to use the site: you have to be 13 years old and… be a human! (ahummmm… taken directly from their terms of use!
Cheers!
Louise
Hi guys, I was wondering if you know of a software, offline and online that kind of does all around accounting / wealth management? I think wesabe had a good idea, mint.com will be perfect for much of people’s reqs, but something more comprehensive would be even better.
1. mortgage section / analyzer – allow me to enter terms of my mortgage, and suggest prepayment amounts, or if that $2K extra cash I might have in had would be better off inside an RRSP, as prepayment, in my TFSA, or elsewhere
2. income from rental properties – using the data from mortgage section, calculate current cap rate, cash flow, perhaps set that if anything above $10K sits in that account, it should be moved elsewhere… again, an optimizer that makes it easy to file/categorize rental-related expenses, or be compatible with a HELOC…
3. investment tracking, both registered and not…
Any ideas?