Contrary to the name of this post MoneyStands is not dead! I once thought MoneyStrands was better than Yodlee or Mint. It quickly added Wesabe and Quicken Online imports, after these companies abandoned users. It was especially disgusting to have Intuit buy Mint, promise to transfer Quicken Online data to Mint and then abandon Quicken Online users. The fast MoneyStrands rescue meant a lot to many of us.
Unfortunately, Moneystrands stopped automatic downloads of account data on March 19, 2011. As of February 3, 2012 there was still no indication of when (if ever) these Moneystrands downloads might resume. A MoneyStands officer confirmed this yesterday in a call to me. He said this related to the high cost of Yodlee feeds. However, he also said that financial giants ING and the Bank of Montreal were now using MoneyStrands. A look at the MoneyStrands website also shows a lively evolving website.
That means Moneystrands is not dead, but I would still RUSH to the free Yodlee service for automatic dialy downloads. Unlike Moneystrands, Yodlee has been in business for a long time. It already has 30 milllion users, as 300 top banks use it internally. Bank of America also invested $20 million in Yodlee stock. Soon after you begin using Yodlee, your accounts will have three months of prior data.
These data loss and backup statistics should make us all queston our ability to wait for Moneystrands (besides making us backup fanatics):
- 30% of those with a major fire go out of business in a year.
- 70% of those with a major fire go out of business in 5 years.
- 31% of PC users lose all files.
- 60% of companies that lose data shut down in 6 months.
- 50% of those losing data for 10+ days, bankrupt at once.
- 93% of those losing data for 10+ days, bankrupt in a year.
You probably heard about the three most important things about real estate: location, location and location. Well, in running a buisiness, the three most important things are backup and restore, backup and restore and backup and restore. The only thing you can absolutely guarantee about backups and computers is that computers will fail, often at the worst possible time, destroying all your data. The only three ways to prevent this are backup and restore, backup and restore and backup and restore.
Until you restore, you do not know if you have a valid backup. That is why I am so happy we use the free Dropbox service to backup QuickBooks files, locally and remotely, each time we close QuickBooks. We now help every client do this.
Having Moneystrands account feeds stop is not like losing all data. However, the above statistics show that 10+ days without current data can have a major effect on the ability of businesses to survive.
Since Moneystrands is dead for automatic downloads, I say RUSH to Yodlee.
