Mint Budget Update
Dear Mint,
Why are you trying to merge my Budget Tab & My Overview Tab? If I need to know how much I've spent out of my budget - I'll see that already on the overview tab when I first login. Why are you making it so hard for me to figure out how much I budgeted for each category for the month? Why do I now have to roll-over the budget to see how much I'm allowing for that category? FREAKING ANNOYING. I go to the budget tab to set up my budget - not to see how much I have left. Just because you can do cool things with rollovers.
Please don't add things just so that you can say you did something this year on your yearly review. Please only add things that add value to the user. If you want to add how much I've spent already in that budget - at least do a $25/$100 or something along that lines - not just what is left - so it's a huge pain for me if I'm adjusting my budget to see how much more I need to add if a new expense comes up. It only makes it easier to see what I can subtract from. So it only meets half of my need.
I don't like the $10 increments either. $10 is just arbitrary and doesn't make sense for 90% of the categories I have. Some categories (like my small coffee budget) - I want down to the dollar granularity. For other budgets (like shopping) - I want much larger granularity - like $50 increments. In both cases, it takes more clicks to get to what I want. Not cool. Can't you do data mining or something and see what average budget sizes are for each category and then chose a reasonable increment based on your current users?
I get the direction - and see how it COULD add value - but I think the execution is lacking and doesn't show customer focus or detailed thought about how customers use the products. Very unlike your usual self - do you have Season Affective Disorder or something, Mint? Please don't lay in bed all day! I need you!
I love Mint.com - it's a fabulous product - I've benefited from both the budgeting & goals portion as well as by opening new accounts through Mint that have offered better rates.
I have another beef - there is something screwy about the history of my accounts. Mint is not properly tracking my historic net worth. It used to include some stocks that I was holding, but once I sold them, it disappeared from my past net worth calculations. Very strange. Plus, on my investment page it always says I have a couple thousand more than I acutally do. The correct balance shows up on my overview page, but it's higher for some reason on my investment page. It makes it very hard to do long term tracking of my investment values. It's not like it will save a value on a date - it seems to keep recalculating past values - and somehow it's all screwy.
Plus - I'd still like comparing two budgets - like what if I bought a house - how would that effect my monthly budget & goals, I'd need to change bill payments, but I wouldn't be saving towards a house anymore, how much would my utilities go up, etc.. And I'd like to forecast my account balances.
You guys are great! Keep up the work - and keep users like me in mind when you're at it.
Why are you trying to merge my Budget Tab & My Overview Tab? If I need to know how much I've spent out of my budget - I'll see that already on the overview tab when I first login. Why are you making it so hard for me to figure out how much I budgeted for each category for the month? Why do I now have to roll-over the budget to see how much I'm allowing for that category? FREAKING ANNOYING. I go to the budget tab to set up my budget - not to see how much I have left. Just because you can do cool things with rollovers.
Please don't add things just so that you can say you did something this year on your yearly review. Please only add things that add value to the user. If you want to add how much I've spent already in that budget - at least do a $25/$100 or something along that lines - not just what is left - so it's a huge pain for me if I'm adjusting my budget to see how much more I need to add if a new expense comes up. It only makes it easier to see what I can subtract from. So it only meets half of my need.
I don't like the $10 increments either. $10 is just arbitrary and doesn't make sense for 90% of the categories I have. Some categories (like my small coffee budget) - I want down to the dollar granularity. For other budgets (like shopping) - I want much larger granularity - like $50 increments. In both cases, it takes more clicks to get to what I want. Not cool. Can't you do data mining or something and see what average budget sizes are for each category and then chose a reasonable increment based on your current users?
I get the direction - and see how it COULD add value - but I think the execution is lacking and doesn't show customer focus or detailed thought about how customers use the products. Very unlike your usual self - do you have Season Affective Disorder or something, Mint? Please don't lay in bed all day! I need you!
I love Mint.com - it's a fabulous product - I've benefited from both the budgeting & goals portion as well as by opening new accounts through Mint that have offered better rates.
I have another beef - there is something screwy about the history of my accounts. Mint is not properly tracking my historic net worth. It used to include some stocks that I was holding, but once I sold them, it disappeared from my past net worth calculations. Very strange. Plus, on my investment page it always says I have a couple thousand more than I acutally do. The correct balance shows up on my overview page, but it's higher for some reason on my investment page. It makes it very hard to do long term tracking of my investment values. It's not like it will save a value on a date - it seems to keep recalculating past values - and somehow it's all screwy.
Plus - I'd still like comparing two budgets - like what if I bought a house - how would that effect my monthly budget & goals, I'd need to change bill payments, but I wouldn't be saving towards a house anymore, how much would my utilities go up, etc.. And I'd like to forecast my account balances.
You guys are great! Keep up the work - and keep users like me in mind when you're at it.
Comments