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Mint adds SMS access

Financial site Mint clones a Quicken feature: It will text you your bank balances.

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Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
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Rafe Needleman

Personal finance site Mint is getting a useful SMS query capability: You send the word "Bal" or "balance" to short code 696468, and it will send back the balances of your bank and credit accounts. Simple. And potentially useful if you're out and want to know if you have money to pay for or charge an item.

Intuit has a nearly identical feature for its now-free Quicken Online app, called Quicken Beam. Like Mint's SMS query feature, it will send your balance data if you text the word "Bal" to the Quicken short code 636363. Beam actually does a bit more, showing you the five most recent transactions posted to each account.

Being able to access basic account data from a mobile phone is a useful feature, and I'm glad to see these popular services layering in this utility.

See also: Geezeo, Buxfer, and PageOnce.