Abstract: Techniques for credential free, alert based personal finance management are disclosed herein. An embodiment of a credential free, alert based method comprises receiving from a financial institution a transaction message indicating a transaction that occurs a short time period ago; recognizing the transaction message and translating the transaction message into an alert in a predetermined uniform format; transmitting the alert to a user's device and prompting a user to tag the transaction with at least one category; and receiving from the user's device a response indicating the category that the user tagged.