Green Sherpa Flexes For Competition With Mint/Quicken

A few days ago I had the opportunity to talk with Erin Lozano, the COO and founder of Green Sherpa about how the company has changed since the launch a year ago.

Green Sherpa ended its Beta program in August and launched its full subscription services. They now support more than 10,000 financial institutions and in addition to those already serviced by Yodlee, also can manually establish connections to their customers’ banks—a service the competition isn’t offering. They’ve also added more cash-flow planning tools and goal-tracking tools for users and are getting ready to debut a few more new tools in the next 60 days (though I don’t get to report on those...yet.).

Green Sherpa is one of the only hybrid aggregating services as they can combine automated aggregation as well as set up individual connections. Green Sherpa worked to establish additional layers of security beyond what is offered by their aggregation provider. They’re also one of just a handful of software-as-a-service (SaaS) or “cloud” software providers that is charging a fee for an online-only product in the personal financial management field.

The company is lean and mean, with six employees and a ridiculously low breakeven point of only 5,000 subscribers, but their personal touch and low price (US $7.95 a month or $5.95 for pre-paying a year) sets them apart from other companies who provide software. Greens Sherpa is striving to provide its customers with an intimate snapshot of their own financial progress and future, not data on a dashboard.

Green Sherpa eliminates the manual data of Excel and Quicken, but also allows customers to download their own data to save, archive and manipulate, even if they choose to cancel the service.

The company also has an active advisory team including former leadership from Commission Junction.

Green Sherpa rolled out an affiliate program this month, which is fully operated on their site, not served through an ad company.

I asked Lozano about how the marketplace has changed since we spoke last in March. She explained that Mint and Quicken have released features that are becoming more forward-looking, and hence now more competing in the same space. Following the recent announcement that Mint would be moving under the Intuit brand, Lozano surprisingly said this is good news to her. “We think that this validates the web based personal financial management space which will be good for all remaining players in the market, including Green Sherpa” she said via email in a follow up conversation.

One thing that hasn’t changed is Green Sherpa’s commitment to a valuable forward-looking product, zero conflict of interest (not advertising/selling to subscribers) and complete privacy to users.

Green Sherpa has changed in one way—temporarily suspending subscriptions, giving users a 90 day free trial period to use the service. Existing subscribers will receive an additional 90 days free. The official company announcement to subscribers is expected out this week.

Jessica Ward is a freelance writer in Seattle, writing on family and personal finance. You can also find her online at www.jessicaward.me or www.thepennywisefamily.com

Just in Time for FINOVATE: Many Companies Launching New Features

Just in time for FINOVATE many new features are being launched by participant companies, some of which we've profiled here before.

I'm following the conference online today via webcast, though wishing I could be in beautiful San Fransisco, which is lovely this time of year.

I'm starting this list with items I've already made notes of, but may update later during the day as I follow along the FINOVATE presentations today.

• Mint (see previous my review) has added CD and Brokerage shopping options. I wish they had this when I choose my brokerage two months ago, but I'm glad they have it now, and I'm glad to see I chose well. They've also added the ability to change dates on transactions which is great for those checks that clear late and things like that, so you can keep your budget on track.

• Lending Club is offering new lender features which Tom posted about earlier today.

• Prosper is live now!

• Wesabe has a tagging system now, which will be a great asset to users.

• Debtgoal (my review) has a brand-new interface which is far more useful and intuitive.

• SmartHippo (my review) has a new questions and answers page at www.smarthippo.com/answers.

• UPDATE: It's 3:00 and I just got an email from GreenSherpa that their beta system is now available.

• UPDATE: it's 4:30 and Rudder just launched an iPhone app. You can get it in the app store. Now word about what's out there for blackberry users.

• SmartyPig continues to respond to customers in real-time, and has added a "lower this" to reduce your monthly savings if friends and family members' contributions to your savings goal has enabled you to choose between meeting your goal sooner, or reducing your monthly contribution. It suggests the difference for you too, so you don't have to do the math.

Jessica Ward is a professional writer and blogger based in Seattle, WA. She also blogs at www.pennywisefamily.blogspot.com, to learn more about her visit www.jessicaward.me

At Finovate 2009 Budget Solutions Abound

Holy budgets Batman! Finovate 2009 is showcasing no less than ten (count them 10!) budget solutions for personal finances. I explored some of these on my blog this past week as I wrote all about budgeting for a week, but there’s a lot out there and I couldn't do them justice there.

For the sake of the reader, I’m going to make some categories here to differentiate what might be right for your style as a prospective user or curious reader. Some of these will overlap due to the nature of the features. All are free to use unless otherwise noted. The denotation ($) means fee-based and (*$) means free during Beta trials, or some features are subscriber-based.

I included a “social media” category here—because two of these are very similar to common social applications. Wesabe is a lot like Facebook in that people can recommend or comment and share information. Geezeo has a lot of Twitter-like features and their “confession booth” even integrates with Twitter (not to mention, it's outrageously addictive).

Rudder is in a bit of a class of its own. It appears to include bill-pay features (note to self to play with this one a bit more).

There are essentially two "classes" of personal finance application in my view. Those that require data-entry of transactions, and those that don't. Otherwise, the items below appear in no particular order and none of these are paid placements.

Aggregator
Green Sherpa ($)
Mint
Wesabe
Geezeo

Quicken (*$)
Rudder

Data-Entry

iBearSoft (mobile only) ($)

LooniesDesk (*$)

BudgetPulse

CalendarBudget (*$)

Social Media Features

Wesabe

Geezeo

Mobile Apps
Mint
Green Sherpa ($)

Wesabe
Ibearsoft (*$)
LooniesDesk(*$)

Green Sherpa Review: Personal Cash Flow Management

Ok, I admit it, I choose financial companies to profile based on my level of curiosity from the company’s name. Yes, a classic case of judging a book by its cover.

Unfortunately, with the Green Sherpa book, I’ve not had an opportunity to get past the cover, so will have to write this review solely based on the company’s press kit. A less-than-desirable level of transparency for this blogger, but you might want to know what this funny-named company does too, so I'll share what I've learned so far and fill you in later as I learn more.

I reviewed Green Sherpa’s materials and then tried to log in for the 30-day free trial. I was greeted by the following message:

Thank you for your interest in Green Sherpa and for signing up for our private beta!
We have been overwhelmed by the positive response and are slowly letting users in during our beta phase. Watch out for an e-mail with an activation link over the next few weeks as we activate your account.
The Green Sherpa Team

Well, I’m glad they’re overwhelmed, I guess, but considering how overwhelmed they are, you’d think there would be a little more buzz about them. Here’s what I know (again, almost exclusively from their PR efforts).

Green Sherpa is a fee-based personal cash-flow software. Their target is the serious DIY money-manager age 30 to 55 who currently uses software from a box on a shelf. They believe their continuous improvement cloud-computing model will show the consumer how easy it is to work online vs. downloading and installing software you’ve got to update and upgrade all of the time. Their theory is that this pitch will also help users to shell out their $7.95 monthly subscription fee.

Not updating and buying new software all of the time would sell me if I were in the market for such software. When will Microsoft get the hint and start doing this with Office? I digress….

Green Sherpa offers a few novel approaches that you don’t find in the free web apps like Wasabe and Mint. You can develop goals, and Green Sherpa shows you progress toward your goals. It also shows you cash-flow projections—the month’s “where you’re going” versus the “where you’ve been” information that most of us get from our personal finance reports.

The dashboard is spreadsheet based so should keep happy all of the spreadsheet devotees. Another distinct advantage is that you can share your information “real time” with your financial team (CPA, broker or attorney) without burning reports to disk, or emailing/printing cumbersome PDF reports. It seems like it would also be nice for baby-boomers who're managing their elderly parents' finances, especially if from a long distance.

Green Sherpa debuted September of 2008. It is currently in beta-release. As mentioned before, it is based on monthly subscriber fees of less than $10 per month. A 30 day free trial is offered, but they’re not accepting new subscribers at this time. I’m not sure if this is a capacity issue or an indicator of institutional health. Overall, it’s a great idea, and if it’s as good as advertised, I could see the potential that it may pay for itself in terms of subscriber fees to the user. I’d love to give this a test-drive and hope that we’ll hear more from these guys before the Finovate conference next month.

Jessica Ward is a freelance writer and blogger. She blogs on personal finance, real estate and families living frugally.