VentureBeat

A number of well-executed personal finance management web startups have been in the spotlight in recent months, including Mint — which won the Techcrunch 40 startup competition — Wesabe and Geezeo. Buxfer, however, has been flying under the radar, and it shouldn’t be.

Beyond a clean interface for tracking your purchases, payments and trends in your spending habits (see screenshot, below), the company has been developing some impressive new features. One is a use of Google Gears that lets you store sensitive financial information on your machine, which is sure to please those concerned about online financial privacy. It also has new, useful Twitter and iPhone integration.

Also, Buxfer is a two-man team with only angel funding, facing large teams that have venture backing.

Like Mint and the others, Buxfer has introduced a way to let you easily synchronize your financial accounts from Bank of America, American Express, Citibank credit cards, Chase credit cards, and more than 300 others with your personal finance information on its site. It uses Google Gears to download your financial account information — your username and password — to an offline Buxfer component that lives on your computer, that syncs with your online Buxfer account. It’s the company’s policy to never store this sensitive user information on its servers. It accesses the data stored on your Google Gears database on your computer, and authenticates you and your information with your financial institution. You can delete the data or make it unavailable to Buxfer whenever you want.

Mint has received some heat from those concerned about letting a web startup store their personal data on its servers. Wesabe, like Buxfer, offers a set of financial information upload tools, so you can store your data on your own computer, then sync it with that site — we’ve found Buxfer’s implementation of this offline component to be easier to use.

For the more stylish geeks among us, Buxfer also offers iPhone and Twitter integration.

You can send transaction information to Buxfer and receive Buxfer alerts on Twitter (details here).

Last week, the company has released a Buxfer iPhone interface which it says has quickly become popular with its users.

When we first met the Buxfer team, almost a year ago, it was comprised of some grad student buddies who had developed a somewhat complicated interface for managing group purchases, instances like figuring out who owes who after a group dinner. While still a small site, the company has come a long way on a shoestring — considering the tiny team as well as the site’s many new features and constantly improving interface.

Buxfer first got seed funding from Y Combinator, then raised a $300,000 angel round last April, from Carnegie Mellon professor Eric Cooper and early Googler Georges Harik.

Buxfer, a site that helps you and your friends keep track of shared expenses, announced today that it is using Amazon’s new payment service to allow its users to settle debts with each other from within the site.

Buxfer competes with a number of other startups focused on helping people do a better job of managing their personal finances, such as Billmonk.

Buxfer stands out for taking a strongly group-oriented approach, quickly showing you how much you owe and are owed from friends.

A built-in payment system has been a big missing component as tracking shared expenses is less useful if you have to separately handle the transcation.

Amazon’s service has been getting good reviews from even normally harsh critics due to its developer-friendly features for customizing to specific sites.

Buxfer’s payment service is free through the end of August. After then, people receiving money will incur a 1.5-2 percent fee, depending on how the payment is made. The service is only available in the United States. More coverage here.

Wesabe, a Web site that lets people manage their finances, and network with network with others for advice, has raised $4 million in a first round of financing.

We first wrote about the Berkeley, Calif. company in November.

The financing was led by Union Square Ventures, of New York, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, of San Francisco, which provided the company with seed money. Its advantage over incumbent services such as Quicken is that it is online and offers its service is free.

However, the company has plenty of competition offering similar services including online services from mainstream banks. It is unclear how many people are entrusting their finances with Wesabe. The company says it has had “tens of thousands” of people register, and that between 60 and 70 percent of the people have returned to the site at least once after registering.

Competitor Buxfer launched a couple of months earlier, and offers more compelling visual graphics, such as pie charts, while offering similar other basic features such as importing expense transactions and providing ways to tag them. With Buxfer, you can add also your transactions via SMS. It does have some group features, such as ways to split expenses with roommates. There’s also Mint, which still hasn’t launched, but has generated buzz since getting backed by First Round Capital.

Wesabe’s Marc Hedlund tells VentureBeat Wesabe’s primary advantage is the extensiveness of its social networks: It lets people share tips about places they visited while dining, and things such as bank fees and debt levels — which provide ways for people to make better financial decisions, Hedlund said. The company has recently offered a Flash-based bar graph comparing expense categories.