Finance Aggregators (Mint, Personal Capital, etc) - still worth the trouble?

[neo von retorch]

A while back, I gave up on Mint. They weren't compatible with enough financial institutions I used, and there were way too many Sponsored Suggestions for my taste. I settled into using Personal Capital, but it became apparent that the poorly supported tools on the free site merely exist to attract potential paid clients. That's business, and I don't have a problem with that, but the issues with the tool have become increasingly difficult to work around. One issue is that I didn't add my house immediately, but when I did, there was no way to control when it became an asset, so it appeared that I suddenly had way more money than before. I have to view graphs either before I got my house, or after, but if I tried to overlap those time periods, the huge jump made graphs useless. Another issue is that when you close an account, you cannot delete it. You have to leave it there forever, unsuccessfully connecting, because to remove an account is to lose all history! Now, Vanguard just combined your main account with your brokerage, and this didn't go well at Personal Capital either. Apparently all my previous account history is lost forever, and it appears as if my investment account is brand new, and once again my graphs show a huge (but false) increase in net worth. In each case, I've contacted them for support, but all I get is "that's not supported" and none of those issues have been fixed in the several years since they first came to my attention.

I like pretty graphs. I like tracking my net worth over time. But I'm tired of the hassle and incorrect information. At this point, I think I'm going to close my P.C. account, and get to work adding pretty graphs to my own custom software. (I've been using home-rolled software to track things since 2003 - but it's very manual, a little quirky, and doesn't have any pretty graphs so far.)

Have any of you had better experiences with these or other account aggregators?

[Jack]

From another thread, I just found out that there's a standard for connecting to online accounts called OFX and that GnuCash can use it. I haven't actually tried it out yet, but that might be promising.

[Mikila]

Following

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[matchewed]

Only worth the trouble if you get value out of them. I tried out PC for a few months and dumped them because the hassle (do you want our advice? no. now? nope. how about now? no. changed your mind yet? deleting account) wasn't worth it. I still have mint but use it rarely. Monthly glance to make sure things are being taken out of the correct accounts and a longer six month check to update personal spreadsheets.

[MDM]

Have any of you had better experiences with these or other account aggregators?

While it has its faults, Quicken does work for many accounts.

[El Gringo]

The same thing happened to me, where PC screwed up my investing account - first they accidentally duplicated it, then when I contacted them, they accidentally deleted the original account and left the duplicate account, showing a huge jump in my net worth, destroying the data I had for like two years. :/ Pretty frustrating. It took several months of emailing them too.

[partgypsy]

A while back, I gave up on Mint. They weren't compatible with enough financial institutions I used, and there were way too many Sponsored Suggestions for my taste. I settled into using Personal Capital, but it became apparent that the poorly supported tools on the free site merely exist to attract potential paid clients. That's business, and I don't have a problem with that, but the issues with the tool have become increasingly difficult to work around. One issue is that I didn't add my house immediately, but when I did, there was no way to control when it became an asset, so it appeared that I suddenly had way more money than before. I have to view graphs either before I got my house, or after, but if I tried to overlap those time periods, the huge jump made graphs useless. Another issue is that when you close an account, you cannot delete it. You have to leave it there forever, unsuccessfully connecting, because to remove an account is to lose all history! Now, Vanguard just combined your main account with your brokerage, and this didn't go well at Personal Capital either. Apparently all my previous account history is lost forever, and it appears as if my investment account is brand new, and once again my graphs show a huge (but false) increase in net worth. In each case, I've contacted them for support, but all I get is "that's not supported" and none of those issues have been fixed in the several years since they first came to my attention.

I like pretty graphs. I like tracking my net worth over time. But I'm tired of the hassle and incorrect information. At this point, I think I'm going to close my P.C. account, and get to work adding pretty graphs to my own custom software. (I've been using home-rolled software to track things since 2003 - but it's very manual, a little quirky, and doesn't have any pretty graphs so far.)

Have any of you had better experiences with these or other account aggregators?

I'm actually kind of glad to hear this because I was wondering if this was only bothering me or not. I wanted to like mint, I wanted to be able to log in and get a snapshot how we are doing month to month. But because of losing ability to login onto accounts on regular basis, not being able to close closed accounts or lose the history, wasn't accurate. For now I just use excel. 

[JZinCO]

I've had issues with PC. It cannot connect with all of my accounts. It considers p2p as cash and I would prefer it classified as consumer debt or, at least alternative. My pension fund is considered cash but it functions as fixed income.
Also, I have closed accounts or had an account get reclassified (e.g. I changed my vanguard tIRA to a brokerage acct to use ETFs) and my history got wiped.
For me, It's most important to track transactions, have every active account readable in one place, and see cash flow. So, I still use PC.