Kublax: Social tool to manage your finances

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If you are following the news the words ‘credit crunch’, ‘market down’, ‘record levels’, ‘recession’.. would be very familiar, almost annoying. During these times the advice is to keep a close eye on your cash !

So here is a social tool to manage your money, Kublax. Another way of describing is: Mint.com for the UK. Kublax combination of “Kuber” and “Laxmi”. In Indian mythology Kuber is the God of wealth and Laxmi is    the goddess of fortune, riches and splendour. The site allows you to get your financial statements from major banks, housing societies and credit card companies. Currently it supports:

Nationwide, Alliance Leicester, Halifax, American Express, Barclays, Capital One, citibank, NatWest, Lloyds TSB, RBS, Abbey

That’s all the major banks and if you have access to them online then transferring your financial details wouldn’t take that long. Although if you do not wish to supply your ebank loginm then you can simply upload your statements using QuickBooks or Quicken formats. Both these formats are generally available with online banks.

You can also manage your budget month on month:

The questions now is how helpful are these tools ? In regards to Kublax the interface and logic perhaps needs a little more work. For instance I was trying to categorise all my spendings. I was unable to select several expenses and mark them as ‘ATM/Cash Expense’. Perhaps Kublax could use a clever algorithm to automatically mark them in the future?

I feel the less time it takes to label stuff the more are the advantages for end consumers. Excellent example of automatic customisation is TripIt, just send your travel itinerary and it will do all the hard work for you.

Once Kublax has made these changes I feel it will need to address another important issue i.e. Cash/ATM Withdrawals. Unlike businesses the concept of petty cash doesn’t exist. A lot of us including myself prefer paying cash instead of using plastics. After labelling all my expenses I found that 37.61% of my expenses were cash. How do I monitor cash expenses ? Is there a way around it ? Or will I need to change my habits and pay on invoice or credit card.

Overall though I feel Kublax is a clever system with the potential of being bigger and better. With investors like Digitalents Capital, Five Ventures, Omnis Mundi Invest AG and The Accelerator Group (TAG) you can expect big things from the Kublax team.

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