Cambrianhouse has inspired me to become more professional and study a whole lot of new things, so now I am a lot more skilled and I think I may have landed a killer job at Electronic Arts, probably thanks to the mention of GwabsCory Ross
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The Elevator Pitch
For online shoppers who spend and earn money at Amazon/iTunes/PayPal the WebSpender is a personal finance management application that aggregates and manages webSpending and webEarning. Unlike all other personal finance tools our product leverages web services rather than bank statements to manage webAccounts not bank/credit card accounts.
The Idea
I spend over a grand a year on Amazon on books, CDs, DVDs etc. I also sell about the same amount via the Amazon marketplace etc. My idea is to create an application/web service that grabs all that data via Amazon’s web services and presents it to me so I can keep track of my spending, income and “position” with Amazon and budget for what I want to spend. alert me to overspends etc.
Over time, as other webEarning/webSpending sites provide web service accessibility to data, they could also could be added to the application - sites like PayPal, Apple iTunes etc. In other words an aggregator of web service feeds of webEarning/Spending data.
Too many personal finance systems, even the latest “cool” ones, are focused on paying regular household bills and managing “bank” accounts rather than controlling discretionary spending and impulse buying and managing “webspending” accounts. They depend on downloading bank and credit card statements rather than leveraging web services and aggregating webspending/earning data that way.
FYI - I am an accounting software “expert” and previously co-led to beta a web services broker hub project for Navision Software - a company subsequently acquired by Microsoft.
Hey Big WebSpenders - let’s really get financial management into the web 2.0 world
I thought of this idea when I was...
Trying to figure out how much I spent on books last year as part of my PhD research into screenplay analytics
Comments Posted
Excell?
Without joking if these compagnies want to work with you (which I strongly doubt) it would be a nice tool.
Why would they share this figures with your application?
Tommy
as i know there are some webbased personal financial services their product could help u record the spends and income meanwhile their community would let users to speak out how much they spend on particular goods or services, such as foods, transport, rent,etc, therefor users can know if their finance is healthy or not by comparing others.
mint.com, expensr.com are two named online financial websites.
I agrees with the two gentlemen above....
sori for the grammer
@vanhees: Amazon already shares the data via it's API etc.
this could be a great idea. just needs a little fine tuning.
I think that the discretionary money that we spend is more important in some ways. It is on the "margin" and matters more. I don't have any math to back it up. but for some reason my fast food spending seems to matter more than my rent even if it is only a small fraction in total dollars. I'm not explaining myself very well. Let me sleep on it.
Larsbell
Good point about amazone
Tommy
I think some of the consolidated information you want is already available online via your bank. I'd love to see more detail on my credit card receipts (such as URLs linking to purchase) and an opt-in service. But from your/our starting point... being neither a bank nor a merchant... well like Vanhees says there's no reason to work with you, if they want it to happen they'll do it themselves. And if not, block your app from the data.
I think this is all ready there, you just have your eyes looking the wrong way.
Not a bad idea
LarsBell seems to have got it. This is about managing discrectionary spending. All of the services I have referred to in the original idea have an API - of course it may not be public in all cases - it just needs to be opened up a little.
Like many people, I've been online banking for almost a decade so I understand that banks hold a lot of buying/spending information. But they are not the source of the information in this case, merely an intermediary, so the data they hold may be insufficient for interesting analyses of webspending.
As stated in the original idea, the idea is not to get data from banks/credit cards but from the places you actually do the spending - they provide bits of this data to their payment processors so why can't they provide you with the same feed. In fact it may even be illegal not to...
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