How is Wesabe different from a normal desktop financial management application like Quicken?

Hey, Lane,

Sorry for the slow reply. Wesabe is different than desktop applications in that we're primarily focused on creating a community of people helping each other to get the most for their money and to reach their financial goals. I think that many of the desktop personal finance programs were primarily retrospective ("where did my money go?") and were primarily designed around a checkbook metaphor (reconciling, printing checks, and so on). We do include retrospective features, but we're primarily trying to be prospective -- what do I want to do with my money and how can I get there?

You get a lot of benefits from working with a web application for finance, rather than a desktop program. For instance, if a few of our members clean up the bank version of a transaction ("MC/WHLE FOO344425 - 299G") to a human version ("Whole Foods"), then you automatically get that edit done for you. The more people add their data and edit, the less work anyone has to do to get clean, readable reports.

We also think that aggregating data on a web site can help us create a "value bureau" -- sort of like credit bureau, but for consumers' benefit instead of businesses' benefit. You can learn from the experiences of other members whether a business is a good value risk for you or not. For instance, if 100 of our members go to a restaurant but never go back, that restaurant's probably no good. Likewise, if 50 of them come back over the next month, that's probably a really good restaurant. We expose anonymous, aggregate data like this so that you can find the places where you'll get the most for your money.

Also, as billturner says, yes, you can import data from Quicken, MS Money, or any other program that exports OFX, QFX, QIF, or OFC data.

Hope this helps.