How a Great App Improved My Bottom Line

As a followup to a blog I published last year on how to use the Google platform to help run your household, I wanted to share my latest passion - managing my family's finances like a business. I discovered Mint.com about a year ago and it's consumed me ever since. It offers a more user friendly way to ingest and create a consolidated view of your bank accounts, investment accounts, and debt (credit cards, loans). I'm a huge fan of a dashboard. And I love pouring over data to observe trends. Whether or not you share my love for detail, everyone can appreciate trying to answer "where does my money go?" & "how much do we really need to live on?". Well, since I've managed to collect a solid year's worth of transaction data and utilizing the standard reporting functions in Mint, I can tell you my family's top 3 spending categories, how much money we need on a monthly basis, and our projected yearly savings. I may not always like what I see but I now am able to get a realistic view that I can do something about.

So why I am sharing this? Because I know a lot of people trying to get a better handle on their finances. It can seem like a daunting task managing transactional data but it's also necessary to get an accurate financial picture you can act on. I love spreading the word about technology that makes your life easier, especially when it's free. And, I think Mint.com has done an great job of translating what can be a complicated data intensive task into a simple to use web based application and mobile app. Here's where my personal life intersects with my professional life - I appreciate a great app because my company helps companies build great apps. Here's what Mint is doing right that can be applied to any mobile app:

Seamless desktop & mobile experience:

Mint.com is a desktop application, with a primary focus on the financial management tools most useful in a desktop world. What Mint has done right is identify the functions most useful in the mobile context and provided seamless accessibility with that information in a fast & useful way. From app download to first log in you can productive in under 60 seconds.

Make it easy on-the-go:

Mint is tasked with organizing a lot of data. Creating a meaningful experience with all of that data in the mobile context can be challenging. Mint focused on 2 things in the mobile app - balance information & categorizing transactions. While the desktop application allows a lot of preference setting and reporting, in the mobile context the most important thing is: How does my financial picture look RIGHT NOW. This is achieved through functions that show summary of account balances, cash flow, and budget tracking.

Make it enjoyable:

I actually like digging into the details of balancing my checking account and figuring out how to improve my family's bottom line next month. It's a joy interacting with the Mint user interface - both desktop app and mobile app. In the desktop version the report generation is really slick. In the mobile app world while historical reporting is not a focus, the ability to categorize my transactions as granular as I'd like is great. It's almost become a game to categorize my spending as soon as I can. The transactions are downloaded fast using background processes eliminating frustrations with waiting for data to load. Enjoying using an app is 80% of battle when striving to create an app that's "sticky" and viral.

The joy of interacting with this app has helped me be more responsible about managing my family's finances. Which apps do you love and how have they brought positive change to your life?