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Mint strikes again
I love Mint. It helps me manage my finances and I definitely recommend it. However, it’s not without its faults and, because it would be so obviously easy for Mint to correct those problems, it is frustrating that they continue to ignore these year after year after year.
One of the most frustrating problems is something that used to work much better than it does now. It’s not that Mint changed anything; it’s that they have not changed it.
Let me explain. Every month I pay rent at our Over 55 community. In the distant past, I was able to tell Mint to categorize any charge from Oak Point (the name of our community) as Rent. It was so easy.
Alas, a few years back everyone started adding dates to bank and credit card transactions. So what used to appear to Mint as “ELECTRONIC PAYMENT OAK POINT” now has a date appended: “ELECTRONIC PAYMENT OAK POINT 230605”.
You’d think Mint could easily understand that. You’d think that if my rule said to match “ELECTRONIC PAYMENT OAK POINT” that Mint could ignore what follows and categorize it correctly.
But no. It has categorized this as “Home” (yes, it is our home, so fair guess) and this last month it appeared as “Credit Card Payment”. Huh? That last choice is fascinating. I have no credit card named “Oak Point”, so how could it be a credit card payment?
As a programmer, I shake my head in disbelief; even without calling upon AI, which could certainly make short work of this nonsense, the fix is simple: stop matching against rules once you have matched what the customer typed. So simple and so common a need that almost all programming languages have a length argument for comparing strings. Those languages can also easily get the length of a string, so you get that from what the customer said to match, and use it to stop your comparison to transactions. Trivial, so easy that it would take literally seconds to fix. But no, Mint ignores this frequent complaint.
