The Expense Tracker: Voice 2 Money Management

How appropriate is the timing of this post. As Rome burns in Lower Manhattan, it's perhaps time for you to learn about The Expense Tracker, a tool to help people better manage their finances.I found out about them from a post on Tech Crunch.

With a service like Quicken, you have to type in all your expenses every day. Not so with The Expense Tracker. Instead, you call in your expenses as you pay them, and the service transcribes them into your budget. Kinda cool, hunh? You are a lot likely to catch every expense when you input it orally at or near the time of payment.

The offering is from a company called PMC Worldwide, which has developed the technology to enable audio management of a variety of life tasks, like calendaring.

Here's how they describe themselves:

Everyday millions of Americans wake up to another overwhelming day and feel like they just can’t get ahead. People were working all day long and then coming home and instead of spending time with their families, kids, friends or doing things they liked….they were spending time being data entry clerks on their computers with follow-up for the day…notes, setting up calendar for next day, entering contacts, tasks/actions, writing reports, sending email, entering receipts, and more.

VOICE2insight spent the next two years writing software and creating a phone based product that would allow people to just dial an 800# and talk all their details they needed entered into the computer, i.e. Contacts, calendar, and task updates, dictate letters, notes, reports, emails, expense reports and more…

There is a cost, making this one of the few companies I have written about in the last 30 days with a rev model I understand:

$59.70 for 6 months ($9.95 per month) plus a one-time $9.95 setup fee
$14.95 per month plus a one-time $9.95 setup

The positioning is interesting - they claim that through accurate accounting you will be able to "find" money that can be better spent. I think that is absolutely true if you do the math. $3.50 per latte times 5 times 52...

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.