Postfinance discontinues e-cockpit

As per title. On the 11.2.2022.

Are they slowly losing their “hedge” ? Cost more, with less services?

It’s weird. I wonder how much it costed them to support it.

I found it quite clunky and lagging behind some modern options. Not sure if it was an external provider. For sure for some of the other banks it’s an external plug-and-play module.

That being said, and maybe I’m a contrarian, I enjoy PostFinance’s digital services. I like the site, I love the (new) app. Simple things like sharing a PDF with a QR-bill through the Android sharing menu and voilà, the bill is paid! Or putting it in front of my webcam if using the website and it gets read instantly. Not to mention that the EUR account is free, and that you can withdraw for free (with the card) and deposif for free (at the counter) your EUR bills.

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Can you use the app just to send bills to the account without being able to pay from it? I would like to be able to scan bills but I don’t want the risk involved in having full access rights on an app.

It used to be the case that you could just scan with the phone and then validate on the website. I think nowadays the app only works if you give it full access.

You can however upload PDFs or images to the website and also use the webcam like I mentioned.

So they removed another feature?

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Maybe, indeed :smiley::smiley:

(20char)

I always hated it (20 chars)

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I really like the cockpit option.
In fact, I have my finances there since 2014.
Extremely easy to see your finances (yearly, monthly)

They will discontinue everything or only the budgeting part…

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One of the reasons I want to shift back to postfinance from CA (+ the great service network since there are post offices nearly everywhere).

With the e-cockpit discontinuation date shortly around the corner, does anyone have recommendations for expenditure tracking tools/platforms that are compatible with PostFinance? Or has anyone heard if they plan to replace it with something?

I’ve always relied on the e-cockpit to get an overview of my household’s spending at a broad category level (e.g. rental costs, household costs, etc.) and am a bit at a loss as to how to do this now in still at least semi-automated way.

Hi all,
I am following up on this topic, as I saw this morning that indeed the e-cockpit has now disappeared.
I used it extensively to follow my monthly expenses, and this is really a blow to my expense tracking strategy. Would you have any workaround to recommend? I do not want to manually tag each of my expenses in a CSV file.

Thanks!

well damn the Post… e-cockpit was one of the best features of PF.

Now they’ve also captured my last 5 years of historic data :frowning:
I wrote them a while ago to be able to export at least the existing data with labels. Answer → not possible. :rage:

Let’s all write them to put it back.

Alternatively if you know a good enough bank that does this ONE feature right, I’m happy to migrate. Please let us know.

Raiffeisen has a very basic functionality but it’s nowhere near as good.

Edit: you can have them extract your e-Cockpit data until 30 April 2022 with your “e-finance participation number”. Does anyone know what that is?

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UBS e-banking has a ‘Budget’ page where income and expenses can be tracked with categories and subcategories. For each category you can specify monthly and annual targets/limits. This works for account transactions as well as UBS credit card transactions. Some transactions are categorized automatically and CSV export is possible. However, I never used PostFinance E-Cockpit, so I have no idea how it compares.

I also don’t use the UBS feature extensively. I do assign categories to transactions when prompted and occasionally take a look at the charts or check the yearly transactions of a certain category. However, I don’t use the per-category target/limit functionality.

PF’s asnwer on the e-cockpit thing.

“We asked our customers what they wanted to improve. We have implemented this feedback with the new update. The redesigned E Finance ensures the best possible technology support. Innovations in design always take a certain amount of time to get used to. But we are convinced that the new e-finance will bring numerous improvements that will users will appreciate. Compared to the benefits for customers, the costs for e-cockpit were too high.”

So it’s probably that it was a plugin by a third party.

@jay what was so cool in PF e-cockpit is that it auto-categorized your spending with approximately 95% accuracy based on where you’ve spent your money. That was pretty cool, so you could look back months/years later and figure out if there’s a trend in your spending that needs addressing.

It could also do budgets, but I couldn’t personally care less about monthly budgeting (if I did, I’d use YNAB).

In UBS e-banking it’s also done automatically for most transactions. Credit card transactions always have an automatic category (based on the category you also see in card statements). However, it’s not perfect, e.g. for digital service providers that offer a variety of services the wrong or a very broad category may be used. When you manually assign a category e.g. for a wire transfer, you can check a box to automatically assign future similar transfers to that category.

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I use and like the “Finanzassistent” by Valiant. It puts all your transactions automatically into categories, quite accurately by the way. The category can be changed by the user if necessary. There’s also a budget part to it, which I don’t need.

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how much is that for a package per year? I was secretly hoping that Neo or Yuh or some newer digital bank could offer this at a “no cost” package in exchange for my money being there.

The cheapest one for a single person without special discount is CHF 8 a month. Requires at least 10k in an account (or a mortgage) and includes a Visa/Mastercard debit and a credit card. The cards are expensive when used outside Switzerland (terrible exchange rate + surcharge).

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Neon’s supposed to have categorization and TWINT and zero fees.
I’ll check it out and will report back.