PFM stands for “personal financial management” — or does it?

MoneyDesktop has released version 4.0 of its award-winning platform, famous for its hypnotically lovely bubble budgets, and the product includes functionality for businesses as well as individuals. The new version of MoneyDesktop allows business owners to include business accounts.

This new feature addresses one of PFM’s shortcomings to date. Most PFM solutions aggregate only personal financial data, yet the financial lives of many consumers are more complicated than just personal accounts. There are also families and businesses to consider. The ability to include these “non-personal” accounts in PFM, and also have the ability to segment them out for budgeting purposes, is very powerful.

V4.0 of MoneyDesktop is certainly not a full-featured business product, but MoneyDesktop has an interest in providing more business features down the road, which would be most welcome since the landscape is sparse. Bradley Leimer, who leads the digital channel strategy for Richmond, Ca.-based Mechanics Bank, lamented the lack of innovative financial products during a Backbase webinar just yesterday. (Video of his presentation is here.)

On MoneyDesktop, the account splicing for business and personal accounts is facilitated by what Matt West, vice president of sales at MoneyDesktop, called the company’s aggregation router, which processes data and delivers it back to the user in an intelligible form.

MoneyDesktop 4.0 is widget-based and built in HTML 5. It can be distributed modularly around a digital banking experience, which is essential for PFM 2.0. PFM should not be tucked into a tab in online banking, but rather a distributed set of tools to help the user achieve financial goals, preferably in context and in real time.

The 4.0 version of MoneyDesktop is currently live with just a few clients, including Mountain America Credit Union, but the upgrade process from Flash to HTML 5 requires just a few lines of code, according to West.

Most of MoneyDesktop’s client relationships are mediated by vendor partners such as Jack Henry Banking, so upgrades naturally happen more slowly in mediated relationships than in direct ones.

MoneyDesktop is available online and for iOS devices. An Android version is currently in testing.