MINT EXPLORED
Posted on April 22, 2008
Filed under TIPS
Without financing, movies could not be made. Then, there have to be ways to keep track of all those finances to make that movie, and if they cannot be tracked then there is no movie. Big Film Studios have accountants and people specifically trained to handle budgets, but what about indie filmmakers? Well, their financial management woes are over because Mint.com has arrived.
Without budgets, filmmakers could not get their films even greenlit. There is a certain amount of money allocated for pre production, production, and postproduction. If you use the budget from one for another, then the film will not be completed, period. Therefore, the importance of keeping a tight budget is detrimental to a film’s completion.
Financial money management software has been around for a while, but the main problem is that a lot of it soaks up too much time to put everything thing in manually. You also have to synchronize it with your bank accounts manually, and even then, like the creator of Mint.com attests to, it still may not work exactly the way you would like it to.
Mint’s inception began around Thanksgiving time in 2005. Aaron started to use Quicken to get his finances straight, but he knew it would take him all day to manually input his finances together. Even then, he was not able to get a simple graph of his spending habits, and that is when he decided he would take matters into his own hands and create his own money management software. So in March 2006 he quit his job and started working on Mint.com, a free online money management software. It went into public Beta in September of 2007.
The first thing you notice about Mint’s website is the Web 2.0-ness. It has the bubbly buttons and gradients, and the pleasing soft colors. When you log in, you get a good overview of all your accounts. It has a financial health bar, which compares your assets vs. your debts. It has an overview of all your budgets too, so that you make sure you keep within the limits you set. You can set up your notifications to get a summary of your accounts, low balances, credit card due dates, and available credit by email and or text. You can also see your ways to save.
This a great way to keep all the accounts under surveillance and a good overview to make sure you stay within budget. Being notified from Mint of coming close to running over budget gives you enough time to react and decide if something, like that one extra shot, is actually worth doing.
Under transactions, it gives you all of the transactions for the last 30 to 90 days for all of your available accounts. You can search your transactions, categorize them, and add notes and labels to them. Another nifty trick is that you can “split” your transactions into several smaller transactions, instead of one huge transaction. This is a really good way to organize all the categories that go into spending for film. There can be one category for film stock, one for equipment rental, and one for food. It’s great!
The most helpful visual aide Mint provides is the spending trend pie chart. The pie is clickable, and is able to break down into even smaller pie charts for specific categories.
There’s also spend space, where you can compare spending ratios from your categories, for example shopping, to other parts of the country. This part is mainly good for personal management and not necessarily for film budgeting reasons, but it’s still pretty cool to look at.
As for security, Mint takes into account several factors that make it one of the safest websites online. First, you don’t have to give your name, just an email address to register. They don’t store any of your accounting information or passwords. Even if someone was able to get into your Mint account, they can’t do anything with the accounts, they can’t transfer money or anything. Your actual account information is stored with Yodlee, an online service company that is like the Fort Knox of online banking. The way Mint works is that it communicates with Yodlee using 128-bit SSL encryption, which is the financial industry standard for data protection. They are the company that provides online banking to other companies like ING direct, Capital One, Wachovia, and a lot of other trading institutions. Plus Mint is Hacker Safe and it’s tested daily.
Mint.com is an automated, fast and easy way to manage your finances, whether it’d be for personal or business use. You can keep track of all of your accounts, and stay within budget.
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