adam bondurant

Mint.com just doesn’t get their users. I began using the site a little over a year ago because I wanted a way to aggregate my finances. At the time, it was a bit slow and clunky, due to its heavy use of AJAX, but it seemed better than the other options I knew about, so I decided to take a look. Things seemed to work pretty well, but over time, it almost seems as though they’ve lost functionality, and not in a “We’re streamlining our interface to make it better” sort of way.

When I began using the site, I remember Mint being able to distinguish between two transactions not only by the name of the merchant, but also by the amount of the transaction. The use case for this is that I have both home and auto insurance under the same company, but for different amounts each month. Unfortunately, with Mint these days (and in reality, I may be remembering functionality that never existed), it’s an all-or-nothing sort of thing: Any transaction coming in for either type of insurance gets categorized into whatever bucket I’ve chosen for my insurance carrier. Which is annoying. Here’s Mint’s response on the issue:

Dear Adam,

Thank you for contacting Mint.com.

Note: Custom categories feature will be out very soon. You may also keep an eye on our forums at forums.mint.com for any updates such as new feature releases.

Please do the following to change the category of a transaction:

a) Login to your Mint account.
b) Click on the “Transactions” tab.
c) Locate the transaction you want to categorize & check the box. Now click on the “categorize” button (you can also double click)
d) A screen will pop open with a variety of popular categories for you to choose from. Click the appropriate category & then scroll down to the save button at the bottom of the screen.

Additional FAQs that may be of interest: http://forums.mint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=13

Special note: You can create a rule to always name the transaction by checking the box for setting a rule.

Thank you,
Mint.com

Special note! You can do the thing that you specifically asked not to do by checking a box! Also, I find it sort of hilarious that they chose to give me that response after I let them know that I just don’t have the time to log in and re-categorize things they failed to route correctly. Hmm, at least they responded, I guess?

I know changes to software don’t come easy: I write software. Users always want different things, and their requests are always the most important… to them. The point here is that when you receive an email from someone, regardless of whether or not you’d like to implement the feature, they’re still taking the time to write about it. Responding with what looks like a form letter and a solution that fails to reference the core issue is only going to make them shy away even more.

Fortunately for me, Yodlee.com includes support for more granular filters, and has custom category/sub-category support (which wasn’t even something I asked for in the Mint email). If you’re looking for a no-hassle solution to financial aggregation and management, you should really give it a try.