Control your finances with the Egg Money Manager (egg.com)

Member Name: dbarcl10

Product:	egg.com
Date:	16/10/08 (750 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Helps monitor how much money you do, or don't have, in one place

Disadvantages: Only available to Egg account holders, only works with Internet Explorer

This isn't so much a review of Egg the bank, rather a review of an application on their website that is similar to online banking, but far more wide-reaching.

Most people these days have current accounts, savings accounts, loans, credit cards, mortgages, perhaps some investment accounts, but if these are not all with the one supplier, how often have you wondered what your total assets or liabilities were?

Internet banking would be one way to find out, but that would take time, going from one website to the next, having to enter you're security details (once you've remember what details go with which account) each time and making a note of the balances for each type of account.

With Egg Money Manager you can bring up details of all you're accounts, with current balances, simply by entering security details for each organisation once.

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WHAT IS EGG MONEY MANAGER?
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The Egg Money Manager is part of the Egg website, and is basically a tool that displays all of the accounts you hold in one place, as long as the company that holds your account is listed on the website. These include Halifax Bank of Scotland, Royal Bank of Scotland, Intelligent Finance, Virgin, Tesco Finance etc. As far as I can tell, all the major financial companies can be used with the Money Manager - including, as I have just found out during writing this review, PayPal. If, on the off chance that an organisation isn't already there, you can suggest that they are added.

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WHO CAN USE EGG MONEY MANAGER?
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The Egg Money Manager is only available to people that hold an account with Egg. Therefore if you have a credit card, loan, mortgage etc with Egg, you can use the Money Manager. Note that secondary cardholders cannot use the service, only the primary account holder.

Also you need to be using Internet Explorer on a PC using Windows, or Internet Explorer for Mac if using an Apple computer. The system does not support other web browsers.

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HOW DO I REGISTER?
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When you originally register for the service you will need to enter certain security details that will enable you to access the Egg Money Manager in the future. The security details include your first name, surname, date of birth, postcode, mother's maiden name and password. If you are not using a shared computer, you can select an option that allows your name, date of birth and postcode to be remembered by the computer, so you only need to enter your mother's maiden name and password to get into the system.

Once in the system, you can add accounts from external organisations. For example, to add an HBOS account, you would select Add New Account, and then select HBOS from the list of organisations. This would then bring up a form that asks for all the security information that HBOS use to log in. Enter these details, hit Save, and the Money Manager goes back to the main screen and will show your Egg account and your HBOS accounts.

If, for example, you had a current account, savings account, and a credit card with HBOS, you would only need to enter the security details once - as long as the three accounts are set up for online banking with HBOS, the Egg Money Manager will bring up the details.

Once the security details for each organisation have been entered, these do not need to be entered again. However you do need to set up Egg Money Manager on each computer that you use as your security information is stored in a 'password store' within your computer. This ensures that nobody within Egg can access your accounts.

As far as I know there are no limits on the number of external accounts you can have set up to work with the Money Manager.

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HOW DOES IT WORK?
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When you visit the Egg website and click on View Your Accounts, the website presents a log in page where you enter your security details (i.e. first name, surname, date of birth, postcode, mother's maiden name and password) which when completed accurately will log you into the website. As part of the automatic log in process, the Money Manager will use the log in details provided for your other accounts to visit their websites, log in, collect balance information for each account type, log back out and present the balances on the Egg Money Manager.

Information is presented in a very useful, and easy to understand way, over 4 columns. The first column gives the name of the company, the second column gives the type of account (i.e. current, savings, credit card etc), with the third column showing debit balances (money owed to you) and credit balances are shown in the fourth column (credit cards, loans, mortgages etc).

The Money Manager also includes a link to each organisation so that if you wanted to go to a particular organisation's online service, you would click the link beside the account you are interested in, and it will log you into the online service for that organisation, allowing you to look at transactions or move money.

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IS IT SAFE?
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As with all financial transactions over the internet, I think there is an element of risk. However I have been using this service for at least 3 years, and have never experienced any problems with other people accessing my accounts.

All security details are stored on your computer, not on the internet, therefore reducing the risk of someone hacking into your details, or a member of Egg staff accessing your details.

Additionally, Egg offers an Egg Guarantee, so if anything happened to the security of your accounts whilst using the Egg Money Manager, you would be covered by Egg.

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SUMMARY
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I normally log into the Money Manager once a day in order to keep track of my finances, and as I have credit cards and bank accounts with a few companies, I find this a very useful tool. It both saves time being able to view all accounts in one place, and saves me the hassle of having to remember security details for each organisation. It is however important to remember your security details in case you ever need to log in from a different machine, and if any of your security details change, you need to remember to update them on all computers you use the Egg Money Manager on or you could find yourself being locked out of your account.

The website does however seem to close down for schedules maintenance quite often, normally on a Saturday night, however this is normally only for a few hours, and any scheduled maintenance is advertised on the Money Manager website at least a few days in advance.

It is unfortunate that the Money Manager is only available to people with an Egg account, and I am unaware of anyone else that offers a similar service, but I would highly recommend it to anyone with an Egg account.

It is also irritating that you have to enter the security details for all accounts each time you set up a new computer to access the system, however if the security details were stored online, rather than on the computer, I'm sure that the element of risk would be vastly increased.

www.egg.com

Summary: A great resource in money management