Online banking v1.4 is here

by Carl on 24 February 2010  |  6 comments
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A quick update on the new features available in the latest version of the lovemoney.com online banking service, which goes live today.

Today we released the latest version of online banking (version 1.4) - here's a quick summary of what's new:

• By popular demand we've added the ability to manage the day of the month that you want your "financial month" to start (you can now change this to reflect your payday)
• We've renamed our categories and made them more useful and relevant to our customers. You can read more about this in a previous blog post.
• We've added the ability to manage your category types in more detail, reflecting where your money comes from and goes.
• We've added a new Analysis section where all your income and expenditure categories are broken down in more detail.

An improved view of your month so far

Customers can continue to categorise transactions in the same way; however, a new feature we've introduced groups your transaction categories into four types:

1. Income
2. Bills (Things you HAVE to pay e.g. mortgage, utility bills)
3. Disposable (Things you WANT but don't necessarily HAVE to pay e.g. entertainment, eating out)
4. Savings (Money you're putting away for the future)

You can edit the default setting of category type by visiting the settings page. Categories are initially sorted into one of these types by default but you can change this to reflect your own money situation.

What this means is that in one single view you can quickly and easily see where the potential is for either saving money or managing a monthly deficit.

These categories are broken down into a simple, at-a-glance visualisation on your online banking dashboard that alerts you if you're overspending or informs you how much you have left this month. We'd love to hear your feedback on this new feature in the comments of this blog.

A new way to analyse income and spending

Online banking now offers you extended analysis of your transactions in the Analysis section where, for every transaction category, you can:

• Look at the total income or expenditure, month by month, since starting using the service
• View an average figure for the monthly income or expenditure within each category

Overall this offers a more granular view of income and expenditure that will help you better understand your income and spending patterns.

Budgeting

Now the granular analysis and average information is plugged-in, our next task (hopefully over the next two weeks) will be to add budgeting. The idea is to allow you to set budgets against each category which will help you to control your spending, save money or eliminate a monthly deficit. More news on this soon.

That's it for now - we need to get back to work! Please leave comments on the blog and tell us what you think. We really want to know if we're on the right path to giving you the features you need. If you're not using lovemoney.com online banking yet, why not get started today.