I recently had a conversation with a friend about Mint.com’s limited featureset, and one of the things that came up was that it would be nice to be able to automatically categorize certain features. We agreed that something similar to gmail’s automatic filters would be useful. Well, it turns out that Mint.com does offer automatic categorizing, but it isn’t quite as nice as gmail’s filters. Instead, you can click on a transaction, and choose to click a checkbox that will automatically categorize all identically named transactions in the currently selected category. Not bad, I guess. At least it’s simple.

So now you can automatically categorize all golf fees into the “uncategorized” or “miscellaneous” expenses and never know how much you spend on golf (something I’ve learned would be detrimental to the golf industry).

I mentioned mint.com as a means for tracking your expenses during a recent post concerning budgeting. I’ve been using mint for a while now, and I’ve come to learn what it can and cannot do.

Mint.com is great because it shows you your current balances and transactions much like MS Money does, but it’s much more automated in it’s process, and the interface is simpler. Of course, there is the major bonus that it’s accessible online, and it’s free. It also has some nice visualization tools, like comparing your expenses to the expenses of people in your area, or around the USA. If you’ve ever been curious as to whether your $1300 monthly expenses for your little puppy, princess fluffy, are up to par with the residents of Burbank California, mint.com has the answer.

If only mint.com had the ability to do accumlative budgeting (i.e. stuff I didn’t spend in my groceries category carries over to next month’s pool of grocery money), I might use mint.com exclusively for tracking my budgeting. Instead, it serves as an awesome aggregator for my many bank accounts.