A few days ago, my wife and I were trying to remember the name of a restaurant we ate at on vacation several years ago.

The answer didn't really matter, but I shouldn't even have had to tax my meager memory cells on this. Someone with perfect recall already knows the restaurant name, location, and exactly how much we spent. In this case, Bank of America. I used its credit card.

I should be able to hit BofA's mobile app, type or speak "orlando," and instantly see the dozen or so charges I've made in Central Florida. Even better, I should be able to access the entire paper trail of card charges from that trip and to get a quick refresher of our itinerary four years ago. 

Yes, this is the vision of personal financial management and we are slowly getting there. But it's still a lot of work to manage the data flowing to third-party PFMs. And logging in to yet another program to find a small bit of info can be tedious (see note 1).

Bottom line: We can debate all we want about how many people will use the mythical thing called PFM. But most people want to know something about a past transaction at least once in a while. They shouldn't have to subscribe to a third-party service find it.

So, financial institutions. Follow Simple's lead (and Jwaala which pioneered it five years ago), and make long-term searchable transaction archives a core part of online and mobile banking (notes 2, 3).

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Simple's natural-language search is an important feature (15 Jan 2013)
Note: Hashtags make subsequent searches even more powerful

Jwaala search

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Notes:
1. Though, for me, Mint's QuickView Mac app, has made transaction look-up much faster by doing away with the login.
2. And you can make "transaction search" a profit center. See Google's business results for ideas.  
3. For info on fee-based financial services, see the Online Banking Report (subscription) on fee-based online services (May 2011); paperless banking and online storage (late 2010); and lifetime statement archives (2005).