I just deleted the three accounts I had created at Wesabe. I don’t remember when I started, but it was probably sometime around 1.5 to 2 years ago. And up until about four months ago, I kept them pretty well updated and maintained. There were a few of my OCD style obsessive rounds of updating/adding/removing tags here and there for the sake of consistency and data organization. It was one of those nights of reworking when I encountered a problem.
You see, an entry to your Wesabe account originally arrives raw and dirty. It’s an all-caps, abbreviated and coded set of letters representing a specific transaction. You, having made that transaction, can safely rename that entry to something more appropriate. Their FAQ provides this example:
The cool thing is that the next time you make a purchase from the same place, it will automatically be converted to the “human readable” version. In addition, for every entry, you can add tags to each entry so that each time you visit your favorite bar (for example), your “alcohol” tag will automatically be associated with the entry. Neat eh? There’s a whole lotta automatical happening here. The end result is that, over time you build a pretty nice collection of data regarding your money, data that can then be used to generate graphs and such to really get a handle on your finances.
The problem I encountered was how I handled checks. Which was not so smartly. I would pretty much keep the checks titled as they originally came in (e.g. “CHECK #1022″). I’d then use the tags to identify that check’s purpose (e.g. “power bill”). It wasn’t ideal because, of course, every check is different. So I had to manually add tags for each one. But I thought I was using it as a sort of enhanced checkbook/register. A combo of check tracking and record keeping. Four months ago I realized how I should have been doing it. Instead of naming the entry “CHECK #1209″ and tagging it with “utility, bill, powercompany”, I should have named the entry “Power Company” and tagged it “bill, utility”. From that point forward, any check entry I rename as “Power Company” will automatically have associated with it the correct tags. I wish I could remember exactly what else, but there was some issues about generating those great spending graphs when all I used was the “powercompany” tag as opposed to all “Power Company” entries. The “Power Company” example is a real one. Some of the data I was most interested in collecting was utility bills (water, power, gas) over time, and it was only recently that I began paying those online.
I decided to go through and fix them. I would search for the “powercompany” tag and rename all of the entries as well as removing the tag. Something wasn’t working right so I then started going through every entry, one at a time, finding the “CHECK #n” ones and renaming them based on the tags. At some point during that arduous (yet absurdly rewarding) process, I noticed a strange mistake: Editing the name of one check entry to “Power Company” mysteriously changed most all entries for “Water Company” to “Power Company”. That change then triggered a tag update to match the “Water Company” tags. I was getting frustrated but backtracked, checked my checks register (maintained as a Google spreadsheet by the way) and re-fixed the entries. But of course, at some point during that process, it happened again. Now I was ticked. After a bunch of work and mucking around, I figured out where I had gone wrong.
When I got married, my wife and I started a joint checking account with a bank different from both of our personal accounts and household bills were paid out of this new account. For whatever reason, the new bank’s entries entered the Wesabe system as “FED CLEARING DEBIT”, and as they came in, I would match the amount with my register and then modify the entry’s name to match the check number. So as each “FED CLEARING DEBIT” came in, I would change it to “CHECK #1920″ and “CHECK #1921″ etc. For whatever reason future “FED CLEARING DEBIT” items weren’t automatically changed, and I continued editing them. So now, here I am attempting to change “CHECK #1920″ to “Power Company” and, in the background, Wesabe is going “This was originally ‘FED CLEARING DEBIT’ and the user is changing it to ‘Power Company’, find all entries that were previously ‘FED CLEARING DEBIT’ and change them to ‘Power Company’ as well.“. The powerful feature of automatically updating entries is now ruining my data. I sent them a support email, they asked me to use the site to generate a “key” and write back. I did so and was told that Brad would be handling my issue, but
It may take him a little while to get back to you - his support load is heavy right now and he has quite a bit of a backlog.
It says if I don’t hear back in ten days, shoot another email their way. Twenty-six days later I ask about an update and never heard back. So tonight I deleted it all. For it to just be sitting there unmanaged, rotting away as useless……well it was just too much for me.
It stinks because it really can be such a powerful tool. Collecting loads of data, marking it up with associated data, and then distilling it all into useful and/or interesting information is just plain geeky cool. I think sometime later I might try again. Maybe scale back to just the one, joint account. Plus now the vast majority of monthly bills are paid online.
And of course, now I know what to do.