For those that carry a Discover Card, Discover offers a free money management tool that is incredibly useful. Called the Spend Analyzer, Discover’s online tool helps you control spending by giving you an easy to understand snapshot of the money you’ve charged to your Discover card. And the great thing about this tool is that the data is derived automatically from the charges you add to your card. Spend Analyzer organizes the charges by category and presents the information to you almost like a detailed budget.
Because a picture truly is worth a thousands words, here is a snapshot of Discover’s Spend Analyzer taken from my own Discover More Card account (click image to enlarge):
As you can see from the image, the Spend Analyzer let’s you look at your spending over several different time periods ranging from 1 month to 24 months. And you can drill down into any spending category for more details. Here’s what the detail view looks like for the category Merchandise:
You can then drill down to individual retailers and transactions to see how you’ve spent your money. Spend Analyzer let’s you print out any view and save views to a .pdf file. Of all the money management tools designed by credit card companies, Discover’s Spend Analyzer ranks the highest.