“In recent months Wesabe has been operating on a shoestring budget, with support from some of the developers and operations people who made up our core team. While the site has remained online and we continue to hear from people who find it helpful, we have not been able to provide the support people need to use it for something so central as financial management. I’ve felt especially terrible that some members have a good initial experience but then hit a problem, often after investing many hours, and aren’t able to get help with it. That’s obviously a bad experience, and not what we want to offer. Also, because Wesabe stores such highly sensitive data, continuing to operate the service with shoestring operations and security staff is not acceptable, and we do not want to continue accepting new accounts if we cannot guarantee the security level we believe our service requires.”

Wesabe grew only slightly, but was dominated in competition by Mint.com.  Mint was acquired by Intuit for $170 million a few years after launching. [TechCrunch]

Creating an account in Wesabe is very simple.  The website registration just asks for a user-name, public name, password, and a couple of security questions.  After that, users can upload accounts whether it is Brokerage, Cash, Checking, Credit Card, Credit Line, Money Market, and Savings. 

If a user wants to upload a Checking or Savings account for example, Wesabe asks for the bank name.  After a bank account is selected, the next step is to download account statements to the computer.  It doesn’t matter whether it is OFX, Microsoft Money, Quick, QFX, QIF, or OFC file types, Wesabe supports them all.

As users input information into Wesabe, tips are provided to help with achieving financial goals.  Some of the user-generated tips are quite obvious such as “pack you own lunch” as a means of saving money, but I’m sure more useful content will be added soon enough.

Jason Knight is the founder of Wesabe and Union Square Venture partner, Brad Burnham will join Wesabe’s board of directors.  The announcement is on Wesabe’s blog^[1].

[1] Wheaties for Your Wallet: Wesabe Raises $4M in Series A Funding