Keeping an eye on my money

A couple of days ago I signed up for Moneystrands. Moneystrands is an application that allows you to oversee your personal finances from one single location. The application retrieves information from your bank and centralizes all that input on your application's "desktop", allowing you to see both how much and in what you spend your money and where your income is coming from.  The application also allows you to get recommendations and set alerts.

Before coming back to Spain from the U.S. I remember reading a lot about Mint, a similar service that won a number of awards and that was widely acclaimed by the start-up community. I had tried to use Mint at some point but I noticed that it only works with US banks for the time being.

Moneystrands is one of the diverse initiatives of Strands, a venture built around social recommendations and of Spaniard origins - the founder and CEO is Francisco Martin, a Barcelona-born scientist - with a significant footprint in the US already.  Strands has raised around $55m so far and VC firm Debaque as well BBVA and Spaniard businessman Antonio Asensio, are the investors of reference.

I have only been using Moneystrands for a few days. It is entertaining to play around with it and see in a simple and efficient way how you manage your personal finances. Nonetheless, I am missing some stuff here so far.

- I'd like the system to be able to access my credit card information. Right now that is not possible and one can only track such monthly payments as a single item, which leads to somewhat misleading information

- it would be useful to keep track of your stock, investment funds, ETFs, etc

But all in all, Moneystrands works fine and it is really easy yo use.