Review: Mint

site:  http://mint.com

Overview

Mint – so pretty, so green, so…what’s the problem?

Since I stated with my odd jeep analogy of PFM tools, I figure i’ll just continue with Mint.  If Yodlee is like my first Jeep (miss that baby), then Mint is like my second Jeep (1998 Wrangler, Black, Oversized tires).  I liked that Jeep, it had the same specs and guts as my previous Jeep, but looked a bit different (YJ vs. TJ).  Some Jeep owners like the redesigned TJ’s look and feel more than the older bulkier YJ model in the same regard as those whole like Mint’s UI over Yodlees .  For those who do not know, Mint uses Yodlee for data aggregation (as does Thrive!)

Jeep #2  (sweet tires!)

I have used Mint on and off (off now – had it with the categorization and deleted my account).  Their UI is slick and they have a solid iPhone app, but there are a few things that just turns me away from Mint; most notably their method for categorizing and their renaming of transactions.

Accounts

Mint uses Yodlee’s account base, nuff said!

Support

I find Mint’s support extremely poor.  You want to get an example of what to expect, check out the Mint support forums. 

Example:  I had an issue where Mint would rename a set of transactions that had one word in common, however should be categorized various different ways.  I put in a support ticket…no response.  Reviewed the boards and it seemed like this was an issue for many for quite some time, yet there was no resolution or even communication setting expectations.  The bug itself is extremely painful since you have to manually go back, validate transactions and categories and hope that Mint does not revert them back.   

User Interface

Mint’s UI is what draws people to use their software.  Very easy to use, very clean, very Web 2.0.

Reporting

Mint has decent reporting functionality, with nice looking pie charts and bar graphs, however if the underlying data and categorization is not valid, then your reports are not valid. 

Alerting

Because of the issues with categorization and transaction integrity, I really cannot trust the alerts coming from Mint.  Thus this makes the entire alerting component of Mint useless to me.

Intangibles

Investment Tracking.  Very few online PFM tools have a good method for tracking investments – Mint does!  And since Mint uses Yodlee for data aggregation, you should not have a problem connecting every brokerage, 401k, and mutual fund account.

iPhone App.  The Mint team produced a very slick and useful iPhone app for those with iPhones (I gave my iPhone away, not business / enterprise ready).   When I did have an iPhone, I really liked the high-level overview of my accounts that were right at my fingertips.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a PFM tool that has a nice user interface and are not really concerned about categorization and transactions then Mint is for you.  Having a slick iPhone app doesn’t hurt either!

Now if you thought this was the end of the PFM tools that use Yodlee as a backend, to put it in the words of Yoda, “no, there is another”

Ratings (1 to 5, 5 being highest)

Accounts	5
Support	1
User Interface	5
Reporting	1
Alerting	1
Intangibles	4