Buxfer
Buxfer is a personal finance website that offers many good features for free. You can use it to create a budget, automatically sync all your accounts into one combined dashboard, and split expenses with others. Buxfer can also be upgraded to one of two paid plans for more functionality like forecasting and advanced reporting.
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The Good
- Demo account
- Great features
- Wide variety of currencies
Buxfer offers a live demo account for you to play around with before you decide whether or not you want to sign up. It helps you visualize how you might use Buxfer. When you do set up your Buxfer account, you have the option to log in with one of your other accounts (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or Microsoft) if you like, which makes signing up extremely speedy. The dashboard has a clean design: it looks good and it loads quickly.
Buxfer is a personal finance website that offers many good free features and two upgraded paid plans. The following are some highlights of Buxfer we like:
- Live demo to test the software before you sign up
- Customizable tags to personally categorize expenses
- Website optimized for use on mobile devices
- Email commands to send requests to account
- Forecasting to project net worth
- Shared expenses with other Buxfer users
- Send payments online
- International access with worldwide banks
You can also jump into creating a budget immediately if you already have a feel for what you're spending. You can create your own custom "tags" (Buxfer calls their categories "tags," but that terminology incorrectly implies that you can apply multiple tags to any expense. Rather, Buxfer only allows one tag per budget item so the tags actually function more like "categories.") Tags can add a bit of fun to your budget because you can be creative, e.g., categories like "food-n-drinks" or "mom-is-awesome."
You can choose any one of a wide variety of currencies in which to display your account balances - including Bitcoin. Buxfer also offers forecasting capabilities, to predict your net worth based on your spending patterns.
Buxfer is available worldwide. It works with any bank internationally, and supports over 130 currencies and 60 languages. Although Buxfer doesn't have dedicated mobile apps, they do provide mobile-optimized versions of the site:
- iPhone/Android
- Blackberry & Others
Buxfer even offers the capability of sending requests to your accounts via a set of email commands. You can add an expense, split expenses with friends, or check your balance even if you only have an email connection.
One of Buxfer's most unique features is the ability to share expenses with other Buxfer users. This would come in handy for roommates, party planning, or any other situation where multiple people need to be accountable for payments. You can also send payments online to settle your debts with friends.
The Bad
- No help pages or tutorials
- Limited free plan
- No mobile app
Buxfer falters a bit in the details. Starting up your budget can be intimidating if you've never done it before and there are no tutorials or help pages to guide you. You're really on your own - from coming up with expense and income categories to estimating the amounts you need. Compounding this problem (and others) is that you cannot search the Help Center: you must rely on their FAQ categories to find what you're looking for.
Although most Free Plan users won't bump up against the limit of 5 budgets, they probably will experience the frustration of only being able to add 5 accounts or 5 bill reminders since many people would require a higher limit on these items.
Buxfer has no dedicated apps customized by platform and some people might feel more comfortable with apps from a security standpoint than they do about mobile websites.
The Bottom Line
Buxfer's free budgeting website that is good for people who have a general idea of what their budgets should look like. It can also help people split bills among themselves if they are all Buxfer users. If you're interested in more complex analyses, bill pay, or more than 5 accounts then Buxter's Plus Plan or Pro Plan might work better for you. Those that use Buxfer can expect the following from the service:
- Free trial available
- Forecast tools
- No mobile app
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User Reviews
Star Rating
7 Reviews
Review Breakdown
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Was 'OK' or alright when I first started using their premium offer ($60 a year I think). But often slow to update a transaction with description ; 10 to 30 seconds, very slow for a cloud service. Then in September 2019 they changed their bank sync provider which is when the service significantly plummeted. I spent hours trying to sort out the reconciliation problems ; missing transactions, failed connections, signage round the wrong way. I asked for compensation from Buxfer (I suggested $30 refund for my time and trouble). Buxfer flatly refused anything, despite several appeals to their customer service team. Went to Paypal for support ; Paypal contacted Buxfer on my behalf, Buxfer still refused. Can't recommend a company that refuses to acknowledge poor service.
Buxfer had great promise. I thought it would be a great modern alternative to the clunky, desktop-focused Quicken. But, I have had so many issues with Buxfer that I don't even know where to begin. So, I will mention the biggest problems I have. First, reconciliation is impossible with Buxfer. They have told me that since they sync with my accounts reconciliation is not really necessary. Really? It's how one validates that transactions and balances... reconcile. And, it's needed more than ever with this application because my checking account balance NEVER matches. One night I spend hours going back 15 months (since I started this app) to reconcile and balance every statement. Then, I did a sync and within minutes I was thousands of dollars off. Every month I have been reporting this issue to Buxfer and I have only received one response "We're going to look into this issue" then I get NO resolution. And, every month the balance is different. For instance. The difference between my July 2019 balance was $598. The difference between Aug 2019 was $558. Yet, all transactions were present between the two dates and dollar amounts were correct and no transactions appear in my bank than appeared in Buxfer and vice versa. So, where the heck did this $40 difference happen ... not to mention the $558 and $598 differences? There are other problems like downloading transactions... if a transaction is split then the entire set of tags with their amounts appear as one line item as if it's one big tag... how the heck can I do reporting or a proper pivot table in Excel or Google docs when split tags are group as one uber tag? This application has promised if the leaders of the company gave a darn. But, I don't think they do. I am going to do parallel processing with CountAbout. It's interface is clunky but if I can trust the date, reconciliation and download reports with split transactions placed on separate rows then I will dump Buxfer in a heartbeat. I still wish that Quicken had a completely online version.
Do not be fooled, this will cause you all sorts of problems due the way it updates when connected to your bank. It will take the current balance from your bank and then use that balance to change the balance on the account on buxfer, which means you can have items reconciled incorrectly and Buxfer will not pick up this, it will change the actual balances going back to your orignal transaction, this makes reconcilling a real PIA. Also if you miss entering a transaction you will have no idea because the current balance will always match your bank account balance due to this.
I have been a PRO member Buxfer for 2 years and it was generally quite good during this time, but I believe that they are no longer supporting the application. Earlier on there were some minor bugs that were fixed quite promptly, but recently my bug reports have gone totally unacknowledged. A few weeks ago, my bank account sync stopped working properly and I filed a bug report. A previous bug report from a few months ago for a non-critical bug has also not received any acknowledgement. I have a feeling that they have just stopped supporting the application without notifying the paying members. It's a disappointing and low integrity way to go out.
I have been using Buxfer for over one year now and it is the best budget managing software out there. I have tried Mint and also EverDollar. I pay for the service to sync my accounts automatically and with recent platform upgrades the sync is working excellent. Past issues with the sync are gone. Investing features are not as strong as others but that is not why I use the service. I need a solid budgeting and expense tracking tool and Buxfer it is. There is a mobile app and it works great providing budget status and other functions. Check it out.
I was really excited about Buxfer at first, because it offered features that other online services do not. However, the syncing feature stopped working for my bank, which made the product unusable. I reached out to customer service three times, and never received anything more than an automated response. After 5 weeks of failed syncs, I had no choice but to cancel my subscription; I went back to using Quicken.
My bank was on the list, but it would not load anything at all when I entered my information. Contacted Buxfer support repeatedly. Replies were slow; twice I was told to try again because they've updated the app – but I saw no difference. Eventually I lost interest and went back to using Mint. Unfortunate, because I would have really loved to give Buxfer a solid try. Unfortunately, it wasn't reliable and the support team was slow and unhelpful.
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