Xero Personal - Cloud Accounting software

Xero has come up with a competitive price for their cloud based personal accounting software (£24 a year).  That's the good news.

The bad news is that the only way to get your data into their system is to download bank statements.  This gives me 2 problems - one technical and one more fundamental.  Technically, my main bank (Smile, part of the Co-Op) does not support export in the right format.  The bigger problem is that it only allows you to put your history into their system.  Call me forward thinking but I see accounting systems as ways of looking into the future not just recording the past.  If the system cannot let me take into account my known outgoings to see if I will have enough money in the right accounts in the future, it's not really doing the basics.

To be fair, their web site says that they are'working on' adding manual transactions, so this may be worth watching for the future - especially if they maintain this price point.  To me, having an inexpensive personal accounting product is a really good way to raise their profile and then introduce people to their business editions.  But if the personal system can't cope with personal banking, it makes you wonder if the business version will do the business...

Password security

The link is to a really useful article about password security. Skip the top bit if you are in a hurry but don't miss the concise reviews at the bottom about software that will let you use hundreds of different passwords without having to remember them.

Lifehacker Password Hacked | Productivity501