Is phoning-your-wallet easier than tapping your mobile?

This morning I stumbled upon yet another expense tracker start-up, named ExpenseTracker (!), that tries to differentiate by letting users enter expenses through voice, by calling a number and entering the expense’s details. Other features are advertised as well, such as spending plans tailored by economy experts etc, but the main theme is entering data through voice.

Visiting their site, the first impression you get is that you hit a telemarketing channel. A well-suited man (whose blonde hair looks far from natural) starts to tell you that usually all the budget trackers “rely on you going home [...] and spending hours entering receipts into the right categories [...]. Come on, let’s be real; this is not gonna happen”. The ad goes on even showing a woman calling through her mobile and entering an expense.

First of all, the aesthetics of the website and the telemarketing attitude (check out their moto “You’ll Find Money, Guaranteed!“) won’t convince me that I should trust these people with my financial details. Second, there’s yet another point that makes this whole calling-my-wallet theme pointless: I would rather enter that data into an app running on my mobile phone. There are a few (quite feature-limited) expense tracker apps for the iPhone which can come in handy, and I think it’s far easier to tap a couple of buttons to quickly record your expense, than calling a speech recognition system, not to mention a lot faster.

I am not aware of any such apps for other mobile platforms but I bet we’ll see plenty of them since more and more mobile platforms are about to introduce their own version of Apple’s App Store. Backed up with a powerful web app to sync data with, the stack would be quite useful. But I haven’t seen yet one expense tracking web app that actually displays any insightful realization of my expenses other than plain graphs. If you know any, let me know in the comments.

Meanwhile, other start-ups are trying to assist users in other ways, like shoeboxed, for example that wants you to mail them (snail mail, not e-mail) all your receipts so they scan them and categorize them for you. Thanks, but I’d rather keep my receipts in my office. Unless there’s an app on my phone that snaps a photo of my receipts, auto-magically recognizes the data as well as the kind of expense and records it for me, computes trends and estimates and displays valuable information about my spending and saving habits - until then I’ll stick to the old model of hand-entering the details.