Our bank, Wachovia, used to have an agreement with a company called Yodlee to provide a service called OneStop. OneStop could aggregate bank account information into one master dashboard. You would gave OneStop your username and password to the bank account, and it would parse and display current balance, recent transactions, etc., from your bank's web site. The service can talk to a huge number of accounts, including credit cards, investment accounts, mortgage servicers, etc. It was a very convenient service. Unfortunately, Wachovia chose to cancel their agreement with Yodlee and removed the feature.

However, I just discovered recently that Yodlee has their own non-branded version of the service, called MoneyCenter, and it's much better than Wachovia's branded site! I signed up and re-added a bunch of my old accounts, and I realized that MoneyCenter has a number of fantastic new features that Wachovia didn't expose:

• Automatic categorization of expenses. MoneyCenter knows that Harris Teeter is a grocery store, Target is "miscellaneous household", Lowe's is "home improvement", Amazon is "entertainment", and so on. It managed to very accurately categorize almost all of my recent purchases, and it has a fantastic text or amount-matching tool to automatically categorize things it doesn't recognize.
• From this data, MoneyCenter can render helpful charts of spending, cash-flow charts, etc.
• It understands credit card payments. We usually charge all of our incidental expenses to a credit card to get airline lines or cash back, and I've always struggled with automatic budgeting tools that can't understand that concept. MoneyCenter handles it just fine, with its own category for "credit card payments".
• You can set up a budget and automatically track your progress, because MoneyCenter has all of the transaction data, appropriately categorized! This will be an incredible timesaver over the homebrew spreadsheet budget that I've never been very disciplined about using.

Here are some screenshots. The first one is the chart of spending over the last three month, and the second image is the actual percentage and dollar amount breakdown.

All of this data, in such a useful form, without any of the tedious and repetitive work you usually have to do!

The only caveat to this system is the fact that you have to give an external, 3rd-party site login privileges to all of your accounts. I'm obviously nervous about it, but the convenience outweighs the concern I have. Perhaps someday there will be secure and standard ways to grant access to your account data, but I won't hold my breath.

Another web application called Wesabe bypasses this problem by asking you to upload the bank data for each account on a regular basis. That was simply too much work for me, but they've recently implemented a clever Firefox plugin that can record the actions required to download a statement, and automatically play it back in the background on a scheduled interval. Wesebe's auto-categorization isn't as good as Yodlee's, but the service does bear more investigation.