Nobody loves keeping up with bills and credit card statements. While you can automate most payments these days, you still have to keep an eye on them just in case your credit card was charged twice at a restaurant or your electricity bill has suddenly gone haywire. Finovera, which is launching out of its closed beta this week, wants to help you keep your sanity by checking if your bills look alright and if you’re spending too much.
The service feels a bit like Mint – but with a focus on utilities. The software regularly checks your cell phone bill, for example, and then warns you if it’s higher than usual. You can set it up to check your online accounts with banks, utilities, credit cards, insurers, brokerages and other service providers.
Like Mint, Finovera also shows you trends and other analytics it gathers from your accounts. In total, the company claims it can handle accounts from over 10,000 companies and if your provider doesn’t offer an online account, you can always create payment reminders and track your expenses manually.
Once you’ve set it up, the service organizes all your bills into a single inbox and downloads your statements as PDFs and organizes them for you. One nice feature is that – whenever possible – Finovera automatically downloads twelve months of historical data from all of your accounts.
As with all services that request access to a lot of personal information, the question will be if users are willing to trust them with the login data for some of their most important online accounts. Finovera says it encrypts all data at the browser level and also encrypts all your data on its own servers. The company also says that only those employees involved in infrastructure maintenance ever touch its production servers and that personal data is never copied onto development workstations.
Finovera’s closest competitor is probably Manilla, which launched in 2011. Both companies offer virtually the same features, including bill management and document storage. Manilla says it supports accounts from over 3,500+ vendors, which is significantly less than what Finovera claims. Another close competitor is doxo, which takes a slightly different approach, but offers comparable features. Both of these companies offer mobile apps, however, while Finovera only plans to launch its mobile solutions in the next few months.