Excellent, free money management tool for iPhone and iPod touch

Meet Buxfer, an innovative web and mobile start-up offering an excellent service to help iPhone and iPod touch owners manage their personal finances. Compared to its competitors, Buxfer offers the best interface for iPhone and iPod touch without having to hack your device to install a 3rd party application. Buxfer claims to track your money “effortlessly”, and we’d have to agree. It is by far the easiest to set up and use on a daily basis, and the mobile convenience makes it a real winner for us. One of the concerns about using these kinds of web tools is security, but Buxfer uses Google Gears for offline access to store sensitive data on your computer. And this is just one of the many innovative features from this impressive, two person start-up.

With Buxfer you don’t need to create a new account to begin using it. You can simply sign in with your username and password for AIM, Facebook, Yahoo Messenger, Google, MSN, or OpenID. You can also create groups and keep track of who owes you money. This is a great way to manage finances with housemates or friends. You can also pay back the friends you owe money using Amazon Payments to avoid the hassle of writing checks.

Another cool Buxfer feature is the ability to interact with your account via SMS or Twitter. This allows you to report expenses or transactions while you’re on the move. And Buxfer can send private account alerts back to you as text messages or Tweets, if you wish. And with Buxfer’s widgets for Facebook, Netvibes, and iGoogle, you can be sure your finances are never too far out of view.

Buxfer has all the features you need to manage your bills, payments, credit cards, and bank accounts. Buxfer offers graphical analytics, transaction reports, filters, and the ability to import data from other financial tools such as Quicken. Buxfer even has tagging built in so you can categorize and sort your data in different ways that suit you best.

We already told you about Intuit’s Quicken Online which is due to release very soon and does promise an iPhone interface, but Buxfer has no monthly service charges and is not complicated with too many features you’ll never use. Buxfer is a tool that does one thing and does it very well. It allows you a simple, secure, and fast way to keep your financial profile manageable from anywhere using your iPhone, iPod touch, or computer.

To access Buxfer with your iPhone or iPod touch, point mobile Safari to i.buxfer.com. Other mobile devices can access Buxfer at m.buxfer.com.

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