Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Exchanging information with your banks used to be a hassle. Keeping track of credit card purchases was often a question of waiting for statements to arrive by mail and then entering data by hand. Today, free tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track all of this information. Thanks to this, you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Sponsor Editor's note : This story is part of ReadWriteWeb's Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. Up until April 15, which is the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we'll be looking at how personal finance has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping the online world of personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Mint: Leading the Charge Currently, the two most well-known online tools for personal finance management are arguably Mint and Intuit's Quicken Online . Mint stood out from the pack early on because the company made it extremely easy to keep track of all your expenses. After giving Mint access to your bank and credit card account, the service simply downloads your financial information at regular intervals and organizes it. Mint can even track your 401(k) for you. Mint launched in September 2007 and quickly became the darling of the Web 2.0 world. Unlike most of its desktop-bound competitors, Mint managed to talk to virtually every bank and credit card issuer from day one. In October 2008, Mint came out of beta . Today, the company has more than 1.7 million registered users and sees roughly 700,000 active users every month. In October 2009, the company was signing up 30,000 new users per week. Mint's success didn't go unnoticed by the incumbent market leaders and Intuit acquired Mint in October 2009. In November 2009, Intuit announced that it would begin to phase out Quicken Online in favor of Mint. Microsoft suspended sales of Microsoft Money on June 30, 2009 and doesn't plan to compete in the market anymore . Correction : In December, Microsoft actually announced a plan to enter the personal finance market again with a Mint-like tool it is developing in collaboration with Citi. Beyond Mint While Mint gets most of the mindshare on the web these days, it's by no means the only player in this market. Indeed, the success of Mint has given rise to a plethora of similar tools and legitimizes the efforts of companies that tried to enter this market before Mint. ClearCheckbook.com , for example, launched in May 2006. The company focuses on bringing checkbook management online. A number of other tools are competing more directly with Mint. Wesabe , for example, also focuses on giving users an overview of how they spend their money. Sadly, Wesabe makes downloading your information from your checking and credit card accounts a bit more difficult than Mint. Since acquiring Exepnsr , Strands now also offers its own personal finance tool for setting up and tracking personal budgets and staying on top of your finances. Geezeo - which was founded in 2006, and also looks a lot like Mint, has a very strong focus on budgeting. Most of these tools focus on the U.S. market, but more and more of them are also now available outside of the United States. Kublax , for example, offers a Mint-like service in the U.K. Going Mobile Just like almost every other category of online tools, personal finance tools are also making the move to mobile. Mint and Wesabe , for example, offer both an iPhone app and mobile-optimized websites. Most importantly, all of these services are also able to send out alerts to your phone - either through push alerts on the iPhone or as text messages. Whenever you run the risk of exceeding your credit card limit, for example, these services will send you an alert. Of course, a number of banks have also gotten into this game and now offer their own mobile apps. The Bank of America , Chase Mobile and Wells Fargo apps are currently among the top 10 most downloaded free finance iPhone apps, for example. When it comes to paying your bills, apps like BillMinder and BillTracker make it easy to never forget when a bill is due. What's Next? Over the last few years, the web has clearly transformed the way we use personal finance software. Over the next few months, we will have a closer look at the current generation of personal budgeting and finance tools on the web. We will also analyze the current trends around online finance software. This is the first post in our upcoming series about personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Discuss

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How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance

It seems we've come across way too many stories lately about successful folks stealing good ideas from unknown underdogs. We hate to be the sourpusses of the tech set, but we've come across another unhappy but still viable tale of questionable dealings, this time involving Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and his hot new mobile-linked credit card scanner company, Square . Sponsor Dorsey and his Square co-founder, Jim McKelvey, had reportedly been negotiating with electrical engineering professor Bob Morley, who says he built and filed a patent for the technology for scanning a credit card and converting its data from a magnetic stripe into an audio signal. The professor, who lives and works in St. Louis (where Square has its Operations HQ), said he wanted to give Square his tech in exchange for shares, but that didn't pan out. The parties ended their negotiations unsuccessfully in October, about four months after Morley filed his patent. The patent hasn't yet been published, and no one's certain exactly whose technology Square's card scanner is employing. But let's back it up for a second: How are we even sure this Morley character isn't a complete charlatan who is simply taking advantage of circumstances to cash in on a company valued at $40 million? Through hours of back-breaking research, a.k.a., looking these folks up on Twitter and DoesFollow, we can see that Morley met with Square cofounders in June and was at San Francisco International Airport again in July. But anyone can claim to have met with the Internet famous, right? However, both McKelvey and Dorsey follow Morley on Twitter, suggesting a more intimate relationship. By way of illustrating this point, Dorsey has a million and a half followers and returns the favor to a mere 751 users. It seems unlikely that a close friend or acquaintance would make such potentially damaging claims, but we're sure this happens from time to time, as well. Still, Square is about a lot more than converting magnetic data to an audio signal. There's the iPhone app, photo verification of cardholders and a pretty cool integration with nonprofit organizations, too. And until Morley's patent is granted, Square is free to carry on with business as usual, regardless of who engineered their hardware. But Morley is also free to shop his tech around to other companies - and in a space this hot and this lucrative, we're sure he'll find plenty of interested parties. While we wait to hear back from a Square rep, we're left to ponder the specifics and implications of this unsavory story. There is certainly a lot of gray area here, but the proof will be in the patents. Discuss

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Did Dorsey & Square Cheat on Hardware Development?

At the annual LeWeb conference today, Loic LeMeur interviewed Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey about about Square , the mobile payment system that launched as a limited beta in November. While the demo didn't quite work as expected - the Square dongle wasn't able to read Loic's credit card at first - we did learn a few more details about Square. Among other thing, Dorsey plans to launch an API in the future that will allow Square to connect to other financial systems and bookkeeping software. In addition, Dorsey announced that he plans to make the payment dongle available for free. Sponsor According to Dorsey, finance is one of two industries that is ready for a disruption. The other industry is healthcare, though Dorsey doesn't expect that we will see any major technological disruptions in this businesses within the next two years. One of the original ideas for Square was to use the iPhone camera to take a picture of a credit card and then use OCR software to read the data. As Square wants to be able to offer its service on multiple platform, however, the team decided to use a dongle that plugs into and audio jack. The team is currently working on the private beta and also working on building up its security team. As we noted last week, there are still some questions about the viability of this business, though Dorsey is obviously quite upbeat about the future of its new venture. Discuss

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Jack Dorsey Talks Square at LeWeb: Wants Dongle to be Available for Free

Square , a new mobile phone payment system founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey , just launched its private beta today. Square will give anybody the ability to accept payment cards without having to go through a costly credit card processing service. Instead, Square will give its users the ability to use their mobile phones, laptops or desktop computers to accept payment cards and swipe them with the help of a small dongle that will plug into the computer's or phone's audio jack. Sponsor Square is backed by Khosla Ventures and a team of angel investors. Square's team of advisors includes actress Alyssa Milano , Susan Wu, Ryan Gilbert, Ted Wang and Gregg Kid (who was also an angel investor in Twitter). According to the information on Square's website, users won't have to sign any contracts and there won't be any monthly fees or hidden costs. Square is currently only working with a select group of companies but plans to expand widely in 2010. In its current iteration, Square works on the iPhone and iPod touch. It's not clear how much the dongle will cost, but chances are that it will be cheap, as the company plans to focus on the service and not the hardware. Disrupting the Credit Card Processing Business Credit card processors (the people behind the card swiping machines at your local coffee shop, restaurant or corner store) typically take a hefty cut from every transaction and charge monthly fees. Square want to be a cheaper, more modern alternative to these systems. Square will email receipts to a payer's phone, for example, and allow merchants to track frequent customers and offer them discounts. In addition, Square will also donate one penny for every transaction to a cause of the user's choice. Thanks to Square, every stand at a local farmers' market and every small coffee cart or hot dog vendor on the street will soon be able to accept credit cards without having to go through one of the major credit card processing services. Competition It's worth noting that other services like ePAY and Obopay also offer solutions that allow anybody to accept credit cards, though Square's service looks to be far more elegant than any of the current solutions we have seen. See the next page for additional screenshots The Square dongle Discuss

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Square: Twitter Co-Founder Launches New Mobile Payment System