So I’ve been bouncing through the net for nearly 2 years now, trying to find the perfect online financial application. Yes, trust is a huge factor in this, and I have my safeguards in place. (I don’t want to hear the usual “finger-waving”)
My main use of a financial application is to setup your repeating expenses, repeating income(s), your sporadic but repeatable expenses/income(s), the future one-time expenses/income(s), and to keep tabs of a rolling “map” of my monetary flow for months into the future. It gives me the ability to save “on the fly” and to make sure I have enough set aside for anything. The only thing I could see that does this fully is rudder.com. Unfortunately, the company running it is a little sloppy on customer-relations emails, and sometimes just oddly cannot sync with my bank (Chase)… right now for 4-5 days. It’s not a huge issue for me, as I use MS Money 2002 to store it locally and use rudder.com as a tool that is available everywhere I go. My main gripe is that something so simple should be available almost universally in 2010… wow.
I’ve used mint.com, which is nice but is more geared towards the 10,000 foot view of things and let’s you create goals to achieve. Goals are too finite for me 🙂 Yodlee.com doesn’t seem to do it, justthrive.com seems way too abstract for my use… and I’ve tried doing a spreadsheet but I can’t code THAT well in Excel..
I wish some company had taken MS Money 2002 (not the later ones) and created a web interface that does the same simple tasks.
EDIT/ADDITION June 3, 2010:
And yet again, 3 days of connectivity issues with Chase from rudder.com’s site. Worse yet is that now when you think you have it synced in one place, you click back over to the ‘Overview” button and it attempts to sync again and LOSES that sync you’ve tried for so long to get! There’s about a 1:500 shot of connecting… support@rudder.com has been contacted with the problem (as before), however no communication has ever been returned.
I’d love to find another site that does financial forecasting.
June 7, 2010:
As the issue continues, I’ve contacted Rudder by shooting across all bows so to speak. I’ve emailed support@rudder.com, holler@rudder.com, press@rudder.com, & havefun@rudder.com (job email). As an added measure, I’ve attempted to contact them via their phone number (1-877-730-4914) which is now blocked. I’ve tried calling from two lines, a work line and a cell phone.
My email to them was as follows:
Consider this both a dire warning that the activity of the site as it is right now is a customer-base demoralizer. I have infinite patience, but if it just doesn’t work and no note of a fix in the future, what is the use?
I love the rudder site application, and I am a subscriber much like others are. The forecasting is a perfect addition, and is the primary reason I chose to pay for your site. I would continue, if the site actually functioned as it’s supposed to. Please, address these problems. I have attempted multiple times to reach support@rudder.com and holler@rudder.com, and it’s as if the emails reach dead air.
Throughout the last couple of months, I have had 3 time periods were the site was not able to synchronize against my account and just remained static for a period of time. The last two times, the time periods were dangerously long, stemming 7+ days.
This time, the time period is still ongoing. The fact that the site doesn’t operate via synchronization is fine if you can manually update, however that is not possible with 4 times of attempting with fresh account additions.
As it stands, the site is functionally useless. I cannot contact the office due to the phone number 1.877.730.4914 being blocked. This is an immediate sign of a company closure. I sincerely hope this is not true.
Again, I would love to continue using the site and continue to pay, if the problems are fixed.
My userid is “USERID”. If it matters, my phone number is xxx-xxx-xxxx.
June 9, 2010:
Yesterday evening the rudder.com site started functioning again. No communication was made to tell the existing customers what may have happened, nor any page updates. This leaves an eery feeling of instability amongst the development team and business units within the corporation. In the event of an external problem being the source (perhaps Chase changed something with rudder.com’s communication?), a resource should have been allocated exclusively towards repairing the production site, while either informing the users or disabling the synchronization capability module(s).
I’ve held myself back from creating an open source PHP-based web application that performs the same functions simply because Rudder has the features I need and allocating time to a project like that alone would be inconvenient. With the amount of reliance I have on the forecasting and future monetary controls, my thoughts are changing…
June 17, 2010:
The one thing I notice now is that there is no pay variety of account on rudder. I was a yearly paying customer (ran me $15), and after the recent issues that have gone on it seems that pay version of account no longer exists. My account was ~60 days from expiration as a pay account and now no longer contains the pay area.
Note that the reason for it was to have far more space to hold transactions, instead of having them roll off after a month or two.
The Sociopathic Mind of a Certified Eclectic 