MoneyPatrol Review: Pros, Cons, Comparisons

MoneyPatrol is the latest personal finance tool that is focused on helping you budget and manage your money better by combining all your accounts into one dashboard. 

The MoneyPatrol dashboard is honestly one of the best we've seen from an online tool. However, there are other gaps that aren't quite on par with other financial tools yet. Plus, it is quite expensive compared to other budgeting and financial tools.

Should you consider MoneyPatrol to manage your money? Find out more in our MoneyPatrol review below. See how MoneyPatrol compares to our top money and budgeting apps here.

Who Is MoneyPatrol

MoneyPatrol is a financial health company that helps its customers improve their financial well-being. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in Newark, CA. It is a privately held company. 

Beware that the people behind MoneyPatrol have gone to some effort to keep themselves private. Additionally, clicking on their privacy policy and terms of service links don’t go anywhere.

What Do They Offer?

MoneyPatrol is a money management service with the goal of helping people improve their financial health. For people who are a bit more disorganized with their finances, they will likely benefit the most from MoneyPatrol. The service helps improve financial health through analysis of your spending and sending reminders of upcoming payments.

On Money Patrol’s homepage, they say that “our users have reported an average of $5K+ positive impact on their personal finances.” However, it's tough to decipher what that really means.

After signing up, you can start linking your bank accounts and credit cards. Money Patrol is able to link with a large number of financial institutions, which means you should be able to find most of your accounts.

Once your data is pulled in, Money Patrol will begin performing analysis. The analysis will provide you with insights into where your money is coming and going through its “Money Out-flow” and “Money In-flow” features. You’ll be able to see where you spend the most and start making immediate adjustments. Additionally, you can view spending by category and see trends across a one-year timeframe. 

Budgeting

Budgeting and viewing your spending is where you are likely to spend the most time. After logging in, you’ll see the budget graphic on the homepage with all of the other quick glance graphics. It’s a great snapshot of how you are doing for each merchant based on the budget you’ve set.

Clicking the Budget tab will bring you into the detailed budget. Here, you can view the current month and last six months budget by category. This page provides far more analysis than the quick snapshot on the homepage. You can create a new budget as well. When creating a budget, you can choose from the available categories or create new ones.

Reporting

Reports are another nice feature of Money Patrol. You can view reports for:

• Categories
• Merchants
• Recurring Transactions
• Large Transactions
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Cash Available
• Credit Usage

Alerts and Granting Access To Others

A couple of other features worth mentioning are the large number of alerts that you can set. These alerts can be sent as a text message, e-mail, or both.

You can also grant someone view-only access to your account but they will need to have a Money Patrol account to use this feature.

Where's the Mobile App?

Good question. Most financial management services offer a companion mobile app. That’s not the case with Money Patrol. For whatever reason, they elected to forego a mobile app offering. Although the website states, one is “coming soon.”

What Are The Drawbacks?

MoneyPatrol is pretty new, and as such, it isn't perfect. We really like how it's developing - we love the dashboard, the cash flow tools, and more, but some things make it really annoying to use.

First, you can't name your accounts. All of your accounts use their official name:

Another annoying feature is that a lot of transactions get duplicated for some reason. One of the systems implemented into MoneyPatrol is that you need to review all your transactions (which we love), but it's extremely annoying when it duplicates every transaction so you're spending most of your time deleting things.

Finally, it doesn't have a mobile app, and the web interface is a bit slow. I'm sure these will get worked out with future development, but realize this app is still pretty new compared to others like Personal Capital.

What Does It Cost?

MoneyPatrol has several different pricing plans. All plans come with a 15 day free trial.

They have a Forever-Free plan, which is pretty solid, however you'll run into account syncing issues. The Essential Plan starts at $19.99, and this is the level where your accounts automatically sync. The top plan is Power Users, and it's $69.99 per year. However, it has the most connections available.

MoneyPatrol does offer a free demo. The demo does not require that you sign up. MoneyPatrol has put lots of data into the demo account to make it look like a real account. This lets you view all of the various analysis, graphics, and navigation features.

We think this cost is a big drawback, especially at this point in development. Other robust programs, like Quicken or Simplifi are about half the price.

How Does It Compare?

Money Patrol offers some great features, but it's not the only budgeting app available. We think that other apps provide a more robust experience, and might offer something better for less (or even the same amount).

See this quick comparison below:

How Do I Open An Account?

You can open an account at https://www.moneypatrol.com. 

Is My Money And Information Safe?

MoneyPatrol’s website does use 256-bit SSL encryption. There aren’t any details about how MoneyPatrol connects to banks or other third party services (we're assuming a service like Plaid but it doesn't say).

Unfortunately, it has not made the terms of service or privacy policy web pages available. It’s unclear what happens to your personal data as well. There is no FAQ either to help with these questions. On the plus side, information such as your name, address, and social security number are not collected.

If Money Patrol is like other aggregators, it will use a reputable third party to connect to financial institutions via tokens. This means your bank login information is not passed around or stored with any entities involved with the connection.

Is It Worth It?

MoneyPatrol offers lots of great analysis and will benefit anyone who needs more insight into their spending. Whether that is enough to offset the annual fee is another question. As of today, we don't think so. There is a lot of potential in this app, but they are pricing it as if it was a complete game-changer. It probably has 1-2 more years of iteration and improvement before it could justify this price.

Another issue is that MoneyPatrol does not disclose what happens to your data, including bank login data. This may be an immediate no-go for some. 

With a free demo that doesn’t require you to sign up, anyone can find out if MoneyPatrol is right for them.

Check out MoneyPatrol here >>