Money Dashboard, which is based in a farmstead in Pathhead, a few miles south east of Dalkeith, is offering consumers a free daily snapshot of their overall financial position to help them plan their budgets more easily.

Chaired by former Tesco Personal Finance chief executive Stuart Sinclair and also backed by Edinburgh-based Par Equity and Scottish Enterprise, the new service is hoping to capitalise on a boom in popularity for such organisers in the US in the past couple of years. Services like Quicken, Wesabe and Mint have all found large American audiences, with Mint and its user-base of 1.5 million being bought by Quicken owner Intuit for $170m (£105m) three months ago, only two years after it launched.

Gavin Littlejohn, chief executive of Money Dashboard, said the service, which has beta-launched to a few hundred users in the past few days, will initially concentrate on details of a user’s bank and credit card accounts but will in time provide detailed information about energy, phone bills and investments. To register, customers mus give details and passwords of each of their accounts, which lets the service to get daily updates to show them their latest financial position.

Other functions include letting customers see how much they spend on different categories, such as fuel or insurance; a budget-setter; and email or text warnings when they are about to go overdrawn. In exchange, Money Dashboard recommends targeted financial products from which it takes a cut of sales.

“The service will help the user to identify products that they may need. It does this by gradually building up a picture of the user over time from the financial transactions in their accounts,” said Mr Littlejohn.

He explained the £1m investment, which has come from Par, Scottish Enterprise and various unnamed angel investors, supports a team of 12 staff with expertise in IT, marketing and personal finance. Three previous rounds of funding have totalled around £500,000. The service aims to move to an “open beta” phase for a larger base of users in a few weeks, ahead of a full launch in the second quarter of next year or possibly earlier. The service aims to succeed where previous online accounting has failed for being too complex and needing users to update information manually. It seeks a user base in the “hundreds of thousands” within “two to three years”, at which point it will break even.

But despite the sizeable investment, Money Dashboard appears to have a very limited marketing budget and is focusing on spreading the word through the likes of Facebook and Twitter. While this is often seen as fatal for an online venture seeking to build a substantial investment, particularly with potentially serious security concerns, Mr Littlejohn said he was not worried about it.

“Mint built up its 1.5 million audience and managed to communicate its message without spending any money on above-the-line advertising like television or newspapers,” he said.

On security, he added that the system has been set up so that Money Dashboard actually holds no user information but passes it to a large US-based personal finance aggregator called Yodlee.

He said: “If somebody hacked into your data details on Money Dashboard, they would not be able to see anything except your transaction numbers. And to make things even more secure, Money Dashboard has just been through a full security audit using a security specialist.”

One other interesting feature of the venture is that Mr Littlejohn is a relatively untested entrepeneur. He said his most successful venture to date has been Instant Group, a little-known online service that helped independent financial advisors manage their ­compliance information.

Paul Munn, a partner at Par Equity, said he was impressed by Mr Littlejohn’s “enthusiasm and raw entrepreneurial spirit”, and was reassured by a strong management and board that includes non-executive David Robinson, who founded insurance group Bright Grey.

He said part of the attraction was work Money Dashboard’s team were doing behind the scenes, which included developing a secure “online passport” to make web transactions easier.

He added: “At present, 85% of transactions don’t go through because customers are worried about things like money laundering. Somebody will succeed in this personal finance space. There’s a need – as people’s financial affairs get more complex that’s not going to be served by a shrinking IFA community. Money Dashboard has probably put together the most compelling and usable offering that I’ve seen.”