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Manilla.com
Manilla.com is another service that offers to consolidate and simply your financial world. However, they take a different approach and offer you a solution to track many of the same things as Mint.com does, but adds the ability to track your monthly bills and their payment status. These include your utilities bills, your loyalty programs, cell phones, and magazine and movie subscriptions; all with just one login to remember.
Manilla service is free for you to use as well, but they don’t make their money through referral fees like Mint.com does. Instead, they charge companies a small free upfront to have their services delivered through the site. This ultimately saves larger companies money as the costs to send out paper statements and various mailings has increased dramatically over the years.
The service doesn’t give you an overall financial picture like Mint.com does, but it helps to organize the things you track regularly into one location. From the dashboard, you can easily see what reminders you have and when they are due. With the simplified dashboard layout you can classify things like household bills, financial statements, subscription service, and your travel & rewards items separately. By adding your utility accounts to Manilla, you will have the ability to pay your bill directly from the utility website. The service will open a new window for the utility and your stored credentials will log you in automatically. The payment is not processed by Manilla but instead is process directly from the company for which you have the service.
The reminders page will tell you what bills you have due or what will be due soon. Each line item gives you the ability to View Bill, Go to Site, or modify the entry as Payment Submitted. The interface is clean and clear of ads and the information is presented in a very simple form. If you mark an item as Payment Submitted, it will stay in your reminders list until the account balance is $0.00.
The mail tab in the Manilla dashboard allows you to get a bird’s eye view of your bills, statements, notices, offers, and coupons. These items can be downloaded in PDF and then saved to your computer or left on the site for later usage. Manilla will store these documents for you on their secured servers for as long as you want.
I’ve actually been increasingly frustrated with Mint.com. The bill due alerts routinely show the wrong amount. The deposit alerts are usually several days off and a new credit card that I added at the beginning of the year via my bank account has failed to show up. Their customer support is good as they are quick to reply with possible solutions, but I’m seriously looking to switch to Manilla. Perhaps I’ll end up using both.
I use both… Mint for my financial picture… Manilla for keeping track of bills and payments.