Possible to manually enter transactions(cash purchases)?

Yeah it is a bummer indeed that Mint.com doesn't offer manual transactions. I sometimes use cash, so without the ability to record it in a budget, the tool becomes use becomes pretty diminished. Otherwise, Mint.com is getting better and better.

More here: http://www.ryanwaggoner.com/2008/09/u...

Add you comment to a Mint.com's forum post here.

I'd really like a reply from Mint as to whether and when they are planning to implement this--just so I can stay with it, or ditch them for some other more clunky but more useful tool. They obviously read these comments, so I can't see why they would not respond to a very reasonable question.

It's not habit for a company to discuss what features they may or may not be implementing, so don't count on them saying whether or not this is in the pipeline ;)

I would really like this feature too, though.

Jack, you must know that's horseshit. So I'm wondering why you'd write it.

I subscribe to about 15 feeds from blogs of apps I use, from Get Satisfaction to Evernote to RescueTime to Library Thing, etc.

Mint is at one extreme of not talking to its customers directly about planned or hoped-for features. Mint's blog posts have nothing to do with the app, and Mint employees do not really engage in its own forums about development.

They could find a way to give a heads up on what is, might, and will not happen without too much effort. Others do.

Mint.com looks and feels better than it's competition, but I and others want to know if cash/manual transactions, and pending/future transactions will be supported in the near/middle/far future, according to their current development gameplan.

A yes/no/probability would suffice. It's not like we are asking for proprietary information.

At any rate, a direct response would be very good of Mint. Keeping their customers as appraised (within reasonable limits, of course) of their (changeable) vision for the features would communicate to their customers that they were taking them seriously. It's basic.

I'd like to keep using Mint, but in the long run it is essentially useless to me as far as a genuine budget tool without those two features. How can I make a real budget without them?

The lack of these essential features is a deal-breaker as is, and so I'd like the very reasonable courtesy of a reply for a possible long-term customer who really wants to know if he's wasting his time.

If I may, I've been following Mint for months now and enjoy it, yet am also extremely irritated by it for the same reasons you all have stated. I will say this though, it is getting done. All of it is. The competition (Quicken) has implemented some of the key features we all are looking for (Cash Account) so I can guarantee that it's in the works. Here's a link to a forum post by Justin Maxwell. He's a bit peeved here, but it does have some good info that will hopefully settle some issues.

http://forums.mint.com/showthread.php...

This doesn't help when it comes to reconciling transactions, Matt. I think a true manual registry that allows for reconciliation would make Mint the best in class.

Agreed, Michael. Am hoping they are working on a manual registry. The ATM splitting scheme takes up way too many mental resources.

I have been using "Xpenser" for cash transactions, and then combining with Mint to make a real budget on a spreadsheet. Perhaps soon Mint will do all these things?

We just started using Mint this month and already recommended it to several others. We were doing OK with the ATM splitting but yesterday we cashed a bonus check rather than depositing it and withdrawing the same amount. Now we have no way to enter this pay period's cash expenses, which completely ruins what we expected to be our first month's baseline.

We love it, but this is the biggest functionality hole in the system, and I can see how this would make budgeting with Mint practically useless to a great deal of potetial users

Can you edit checks posted to your checking account in Mint? I'm new, thinking of using Mint, but haven't started. Also concerned with how to handle cash transactions.

If you can edit check transactions, you could treat cash transactions the way bookkeepers handle a petty cash account and it's reimbursement. Add up your receipts from cash spending and figure the total amounts that were expensed for each category (food, gas, entertainment, etc.) Write a check to yourself for the exact total of all the receipts. The check will clear. Then go into this transaction and edit it to split it between the different categories. If you do this near the end of the month, in time for the check to clear before the end of the month, you're actual spending vs budget can usually be accurate enough.

Would this work?

It sounds to me like the issue is that the Mint employees see Mint.com as a fully-automated personal finance solution, without user input required, while manual transactions, by their definition, are not fully automated. Is that the gist of the conflict?

As a Product Manager, I certainly understand (deeply) the desire to avoid feature bloat, and the slippery slope that could potentially arise from allowing manual transactions. There is a whole infrastructure that would need to be in place to truly support those sorts of transactions, and avoiding that infrastructure is appealing, I am sure.

It's probably wise to get some actual data behind this, but I suspect that for many of the people requesting manual transactions (myself included), the desire isn't so much to track how much cash you have (simply looking at your wallet answers that question), but to track where cash was spent. It's budgeting, not net worth, that we are interested in.

It seems like a simple solution would be to allow for transactions to be created which are not a part of any account, or an account where the balance is not calculated. They would factor into budgeting and spending, but would not exist outside of that realm.