11:34 pm, 16 Jun 05
finances
I feel like I've asked this before, but: what software do you use to track your finances? This seems like the sort of problem that would have been solved by now.
(Please note all of my computers run Linux, so Quicken doesn't do me much good.)
(Please note all of my computers run Linux, so Quicken doesn't do me much good.)
However, Synapse manages all their accounts using a system of linked Excel spreadsheets. They tried Tally -- which has a Quicken-like reputation in India -- and decided the UI sucked and they could build something better.
They are a ten person organisation but with significant cash flow, and Excel works just fine for them.
I guess whatever stunts they're doing to keep double entry bookkeeping and multiple accounts in Excel should also work in OpenOffice.
I don't use anything. I just spend carefully and check my bank balance every now and then. ;)
A few times I tried to use programs to track these things, but like most computer-based organisation tools it inevitably gets stale or inaccurate because you forget to list certain things, or you think “I'll do it later”. Maybe you're better organised than me, but I know I've had no luck with any money tracking software nor calendar software, to-do list software or anything of the sort.
The trick was to accept that I will forget to list some things, and to file them away as an Unknown Expense.
I'm still looking for usable To Do list software -- everything I've tried inevitably falls into disuse.
I stopped using Quicken since it decided that my bank statements needed to be imported into a brand new account.
If I ever want graphics and other management crap, I can just hack it in.
I should probably release it at some point.
~ranjith
ranjith.antony at gmail dot com
- the ability to keep records for historical reference
- the ability, from time to time, to answer analytic questions
(what to do next, what I can afford, whether or not I'm in debt)
for both cases, I expect the logs to keep themselves. anything which doesn't log as a result of doing, I know I will eventually give up on logging. so I try to make sure all the important stuff gets logged.
for the analytic questions, usually they don't care about historical data, so I just make a spot snapshot of the information needed for the decision. for todos, I write a todo page in a notebook, decide what to do, and probably never visit that page again after a couple days of ticking items off it. for financial decisions, I make a gnumeric spreadsheet with today's numbers. I twiddle them until I've decided what I needed to decide, then store it and, again, probably never look at it again after a week or so.
I'd like more of the sorts of logs (financial, time use) to go to a place I can analyze them for trends better, though. currently they get stored in hard-to-aggregate forms.
OTOH, I also very rarely look at the back information; I just read the email that we both get whenever there are new transactions on the bank.
Note, BTW, that almost all our transactions go through the bank fairly directly, and German banks give you /lots/ of information... if you can figure out how to decode it. (The most common format for the information is a 27-digit string.)
CBB
I've been using CBB (https://gna.org/projects/cbb) for the last couple of years. It's relatively basic (IIRC the name stands for "cheque book balancer", and that's basically what it does), but pretty easy to use. The ease-of-use is important because it means I actually remember to enter stuff soon after I spend the money. It's got a few analysis tools (breakdown by category, simple graphs and the like), but mostly I just use it as a recording method and to do cross-checking against bank statements.It's written in TCL/Tk and Perl. And stores its data in CSV format, which is handy for writing quick addons (or simply using grep to quickly search for things).
Ewen
I just used a text file for a month or two to track where my money was going, before I decided to get all OCD about this stuff.
I've heard good things about ledger, but it's complicated. I guess gnucash is complicated too.
(My trick of late seems to be to just not have enough assets to make it worth tracking them.)