Consumers looking to better manage their saving and spending can find a slew of new tools at their bank's Web site.

Banks are now offering the type of tools once only available through software programs. For little or no cost, consumers can, among other things, track their spending in different categories and from different sources in one place, create budgets and get e-mail alerts when they are close to or have exceeded their targets, pay bills, share account access with third parties and even transfer and store important documents online.

Financial institutions, which are under pressure to boost deposits, see the new tools as a way to entice customers to spend more time at their sites, open more accounts and bring in more assets - especially amid their propensity to conduct more of their financial transactions online.

About 16 percent of U.S. households used some personal-finance feature at least once in 2006, according to Jim Bruene, publisher of Online Banking Report, a Seattle-based financial publication. That percentage is expected to climb to an estimated 33 percent by 2016, with nearly three-quarters of those households using personal-finance tools offered by their financial institution online.

Banks have attempted to offer personal-financial management online in the past with so-called account-aggregation programs - which allow users to view balances and other details of bank, mutual-fund, brokerage, 401(k) and other accounts on a single screen.

While these programs have met with mixed success, some banks are now using them as the foundation for their souped-up tools.

In January, Bank of America Corp. rolled out a money-management tool that's part of its online-banking service. The tool is available free through My Portfolio, the bank's account-aggregation service, which is part of its online banking.

Consumers enter user names and passwords for their financial accounts - including those outside of Bank of America - and the bank's account-aggregation service will pull in information and balances from those accounts. The tool will then automatically categorize expenses across those accounts based on merchant codes associated with the transactions.

For instance, if a customer uses his or her credit card to pay for a meal at a restaurant, the bank will recognize the merchant code associated with that transaction and assign that expense to a restaurant category. Customers can create guidelines to adjust the way their expenses are categorized and flag items as tax-related, medical or business. They also can set budget goals and create charts that track their actual spending against those targets.

"This puts their financial life on autopilot," says Sanjay Gupta, an e-commerce executive at Bank of America.

Some new tools aim to make bill paying more efficient. Jacksonville, Fla.-based EverBank Financial Corp. is planning to introduce a free service early this summer that allows customers to have their bills sent electronically to their Everbank account online so they can view, pay and store all bills in one place.

Commerce Bank's "virtual private bank" features an online safe-deposit box that stores important documents. Customers can scan copies of wills, passports and birth certificates, tax returns and medical records and upload the files to the bank's Web site.

Commerce Bank, which is owned by Commerce Bancorp Inc., says customers also can have the scanning and uploading done at a local branch. The service is available free to all customers, but they will have to go to a bank or call or email the customer-service department to sign up.

Companies that run online-banking services for banks and credit unions - including Corillian Corp., Online Resources Corp., CheckFree Corp., Yodlee Inc. and Digital Insight Corp. - also are expanding their services to include more personal-finance features.

Corillian, based in Hillsboro, Ore., launched a service in July 2005 that allows individuals to share access to their financial accounts with third parties. Account holders can set limits around which accounts the third party has access to and which actions the user can perform.

For instance, parents can give their college-age child permission to access a joint checking account, but they can set limits on what the child can spend.