Software Bank Account Management Tools

Schluep

This is an off-topic computer related post I thought about making when balancing my checkbooks late last night. It took me so long that by the time I finished I was too tired to make the post here and went to bed, but it definitely got me to thinking that many of the tech-savvy folks here probably have thought of or are doing something more efficient and putting the power of the technology we all work with to their benefit. For some reason I feel like I am still in the dark ages, but I have been doing it this way for years and never thought to try anything else (until last night).

I have three checking accounts (1 personal, 2 business). Even though I pay all of my bills and expenses online through my bank's website, I still keep the ledger up to date and balanced every month by hand in the back of my checkbook. Additionally, I track many of my various business expenses through Excel spreadsheets that I use for tax purposes.

I rarely find myself needing to write out paper checks anymore (usually just my weekly Church donations or other on the fly expenses while out and about). I always have a solid idea of how much I have in each of the accounts and was wondering what people used to track these expenses and keep track of their accounts now that we live in an age of online banking. I can view my last few months account history online at any time as well as my current balance (though this won't include any outstanding checks that have not been cashed which is why it is important for me to still use the paper ledger).

Is there a more efficient way of doing this with a specific software product? Is there something that could potentially sync with my cell phone for when I am away from my laptop? If not a specific piece of software, do you download the data from you bank's website into a spreadsheet for long term tracking and keep carbon copies of paper check in your checkbook until they are cashed? I guess I am just wondering if anyone out there has a more efficient way of performing these tasks than what I have been doing.

ajs1976

I tried using MS Money, but thought it was to much of a pain and want back to just Excel spreadsheets.

Silver Bullet

I use excel to balance and track expense categories for our checking. It works great. In the time it would normally take to just enter income/expenses in the check register, I have that done in excel plus balanced/reconciled, know how much I spent in any category and know what has and has not cleared.

My layout is pretty straightforward. It has 13 tabs along the bottom. First tab is summary/analysis. It shows current balance, how much I have spent in each category for the year and for the month. The other 12 tabs are months. The month tabs look just like a check register with a date, transaction type, payee, type of transaction, debit, credit and one column to mark if an item has cleared the bank.

The transaction type column uses a drop-down list with data validation to choose from a list of items I wanted to keep up with.

My wife and I both like this method a lot more than the traditional method. Saves time, avoids small calculating errors and gives us a detailed analysis of what we spend or save.

seuss_ssues

Probably the most used peice of software ive seen is QuickBooks.

JdotQ

I use Quicken. I've used MS Money in the past, Quicken is very similar; I switched a few years ago just to see the difference between Quicken & Money and haven't switched back (I don't think I'll switch back since I'm now used to the Quicken interface).

All my banks/credit cards offer direct synchronization with Quicken, so one single button click and I can update all my accounts.