I am a big fan of personal finance management software, be it web-based or installed. The US consumers have been enjoying a growing number of well written web software such as Mint.com for a few years now (which I am sure will ultimately prevent the kind of global pickle that the US economy got us into). UK on the other hand have not had any good consumer centric software for personal money management, especially for the Mac platform. Most web apps do not support UK banks, and a service that did support some bit the dust yesterday (kublax.com). Of course you can manually download statements from banks such as NatWest, and import transactions into services such as Wesabe.com. However, there is nothing like automatically updated, live data that services like Mint.com offers to US customers to keep you on top of your finances.

I was therefore very excited to hear of the launch of a new, re-written software for Mac from Intuit, the Essentials 2010. A Cocoa app, it does look the part, and based on the YouTube demo video, does work well too.

However, guess what - it does not work with any of the UK banks. In fact they are not marketing it in the UK. What a bummer! Intuit, there are many FREE services in the US that does the same things as your software, but us the UK have none. So, your market is untapped here. Having checked with the company, there is no ETA on the UK version so far :-(