Review of Artha Money

I was very excited when i saw the first advertisement of Artha Money the first financial tracking site that i had seen in India.

There are a lot of these sites that i have seen in the US--- Intuit money manager, mint.com etc--- and i did try and use them-- however they did not have the capability to link to Indian financial sites. Quite dissapointing really. After all- with a Billion people population -- they just needed to expand their tools and they would have had a great bussiness immediately!

So lets come back to Artha Money.

The website ( i created my account on it today) is a good financial tool and has the capability to link most of your accounts  and give you an overall view of your assets.

 It also has two other great reporting functionalities
1. View of your spending habits
You can come back and put forward tags to each of your transactions in your accounts and artha money hence you can have a view of your monthly spending habits!

2. Creating a Budget on your habits
With the ability to create a budget you can actually view how well are you doing against your plan on an almost real time basis... fantastic feature.


There are a few drawbacks

1. Not all accounts / providers feature in the list
There are some banks which dont seem to be covered in the list

2. Only accounts for which you have online access can be linked-- obviously. This ensured that most of my mutual fund savings etc cannot be shown in the list-- which is not helpful at all!

3. Havent found a means to add any manual inputs -- eg if one has any company deposits-- again creating a gap in your networth or if you have any home loans against your name..

Summary
In all a decent tool for some of the +ves mentioned above. However without being able to add all providers and all accounts it becomes more of a liability than an asset. My own homegrown tracking mechanism seems to be a better bet to get a true financial picture of my net worth.( i will be putting this up as a free product for you all to use-- just putting in my final touches)

does this mean i am not going to use this website at all-- No- I will definately be using this site for looking at my budgeting process and identifying each and every transaction for tracking purposes.

A thumbs up for artha money..

There are few other financial sites that have been launched-- Intuit money manager, perifos... keep on the lookout for my comments on those also.
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