BoA gets some AJAX love

 Bank of America added a "Manage Your Portfolio" tab to their online banking app a few months ago, and I gave up on it pretty quickly.  I tried to add my 401K account, and their connector for the PayChex site was still in beta, so I couldn't get it to work.

I took another look tonight, and my 401K is still out of reach, but I'm willing to bet that the problem is on the PayChex end, and not BoA.  Their site has a host of issues that I don't want to get into right now, but I'm fairly certain that they throw my password away as soon as I reset it, because every time I try to log in (which is generally about once a month) I can't seem to get it right.  When I do reset my password, they assure me that a letter is being sent to me indicating that I've changed my password.  Now, I'm well aware that I just changed my password, but the questionable necessity notifying me of what I've just done notwithstanding, I've never received one of these letters.  I'm sure they're all sitting on someone's desk over at PayChex, just waiting to go out...

My frustrations with PayChex aside, I really like the "Manage Your Portfolio" feature, now that I've given it a second chance.  Bank of America added enough little AJAX tweaks to speed up the page response without going overboard.  When you're looking at your transactions, you can page through them without a refresh, and if you want to update a transaction category or add a note to a transaction, there is some basic functionality for that too.

The reporting features are okay, but it looks like their charts are all done with ImageMagick or something similar, and they aren't interactive at all.   (Maybe they could use some nice -- ahem ahem -- Web 2.0 visualizations?)

The best part about the whole feature is that it will take all of my transactions -- debit card, credit cards, loan payments -- and slap them all into the same list.  There is a basic rules engine (substring on the description field, transaction amount < = >) that lets me assign transactions to certain categories (which is nice, since it automatically assigns purchases from Borders to "Education", when I treat them as "Entertainment"), and the entire thing is searchable.  That's really nice for seeing just how much I spent at DeepDiscount last month...