# How many of you use software to track finances? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 15, 2021, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083 "2021-04-15T14:21:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 11:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/21 "2021-04-16T11:26:17Z")
MS Excel here. Have used it for checking/savings accounts since early 2000s, and since late 2000s my wife and I have used it to keep track of our nest egg - both the work-based 401K type stuff, and the jointly held mutual funds we have. For the checking account, I can prepopulate the spreadsheet with known upcoming bills like house/car payments and credit card payments. The credit card payments are estimates based on historical values - until any given CC bill gets actually paid, at which point I type in the true value. But having estimates in there lets me forecast an approximate balance a year down the road. For our nest egg, we check share prices and quantities once a month for our various investments and punch them into the spreadsheet. Just like for the checking account, the spreadsheet forecasts nest egg balances down the road so we can see what our balance is likely to be at retirement. It also tallies bonds as a percent of the whole, so we can keep track of allocation and make decisions without having to do a bunch of math by hand. Excel has also been useful for estimating what car and house payments would be under various configurations of purchase price, downpayment, payback period, and interest rate. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 12:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/22 "2021-04-16T12:44:40Z")
> [@carlb](#): > > that bugged me about him; he wouldn’t get off of the, “tell me the lifestyle you want in retirement,” train. Our approach has always been, “what can we reasonably expect our retirement income to be, and we’ll adjust our lifestyle accordingly.” He just couldn’t seem to wrap his head around the idea that we wouldn’t be obsessively focused on making and accumulating as much money as humanly possible. > > The part that _really_ pissed me off was when he kept directing all of his questions to me. I told him multiple times, “she makes all the money and has the bigger financial brain. Talk to her,” and he just couldn’t seem to manage it. I’ve never had that particular problem with unresponsive FAs My situation is sorta the opposite. I have a retirement date fixed by law and enjoy my work too much to quit early. Circumstances now force me to live far below my means and as a result about 3/4ths of my net income goes into savings/investments. More or less when I retire the goal is to consume about 30 years of accumulated capital & gains in about 10 years before I’m too decrepit to enjoy it. Then settle down to a comfortable burn rate until the end. Now _that_ is a non-standard accumulate / decumulate curve! I’m sure your wife was pissed. Get this one: My wife is a now-retired attorney. Her entire working life her mother was insanely proud of her “brilliant” legal daughter. However whenever Mom needed legal advice she’d ask me. If my wife / her daughter answered the info was roundly ignored. But she’d hang on my every word. I’ve picked up a smidgen of law by osmosis over the dinner table, but otherwise that’s not my field even a little bit. So what did I do? Refuse to answer questions immediately. Get my wife’s answers from her, then call Mom back and repeat what I’d been told. Worked like a charm. As you might imagine, my wife was _pissed_. Mom was always at her best delivering guilt and/or mixed messages. Sweet and well-meaning, but _very_ trying for her kids. ---
**Author:** ![Lavender\_Pebble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lavender_pebble/32/6290_2.png) [@Lavender\_Pebble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lavender_Pebble)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 2:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/23 "2021-04-16T14:22:54Z")
I’m also a current web version YNAB (You need a Budget) user. I like it a lot and check it daily, and it’s a nice way to make sure that all my charges are actually legit without having to log into three different sites every week. I had an excel spreadsheet before it and also used Mint. But I found Mint to be more of a log rather than a goal-type of program, so I switched. I especially like YNAB for its goal functionality. It did take me a month or two for it to really click though. ---
**Author:** ![JcWoman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jcwoman/32/2889_2.png) [@JcWoman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JcWoman)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/24 "2021-04-16T14:31:33Z")
> [@carlb](#): > > So, I’m mostly just curious - who else is as data-obsessed as we are when it comes to your personal finances. Oh, me, big time. So much that I actually enjoy doing my small business bookkeeping every week. I’ll fly that freak flag proudly, thanks! LOL! We use Quicken for personal finance and Quickbooks for my biz. My husband does our personal finances except that he’s not interested in analysis that much, so I will periodically dump data out of Quicken and into Excel and graph it. I do that also with my Quickbooks data and actually have a collection of Excel reports that I maintain - some updated and reviewed weekly, a bunch updated and analyzed annually. I adore charts and graphs, so I guess the chore of bookkeeping is a means to the end - or the cost of my candy. Did I mention that I was a freak? ---
**Author:** ![Icarus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/icarus/32/72_2.png) [@Icarus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Icarus)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/25 "2021-04-16T15:05:47Z")
I have used Quicken as a check register since dinosaurs walked the earth. And we use credit cards for all purchases, so I do the “split” function for categorization. I don’t download anything, it’s all manual entry. Also, I have a few spreadsheets for tracking portfolio balances and targets. I suppose we are comfortable enough that I don’t **need** to track every penny, but I get comfort in knowing where everything is going. But I’m not a spender anyway, so there is that. My spouse, on the other hand… ---
**Author:** ![ThelmaLou](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thelmalou/32/390_2.png) [@ThelmaLou](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThelmaLou)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/26 "2021-04-16T16:09:13Z")
> [@Icarus](#): > > I don’t download anything, it’s all manual entry. I’m curious about why you enter your bank & CC transactions manually instead of downloading them? I categorize manually where needed. ---
**Author:** ![Icarus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/icarus/32/72_2.png) [@Icarus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Icarus)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/27 "2021-04-16T16:22:38Z")
I concede that I may not know how to use the download feature properly, but once I tried and it wanted to go back in history and stomp all over what I had already in there. It ended up a dog’s breakfast and I restored a backup to fix it. So, once burned, twice shy. And please, friends of SDMB, please PLEASE don’t let this discussion descend into explaining to me how to do it right. I’m fine with how I do it now, thank you very much. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/28 "2021-04-16T17:01:56Z")
Those of you who are using Excel for this; do you have custom workbooks or do you use canned ones? ---
**Author:** ![DCnDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dcndc/32/2842_2.png) [@DCnDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DCnDC)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/29 "2021-04-16T17:16:51Z")
I built mine from a completely blank spreadsheet. I honestly didn’t even have the Excel skill to do it at the time, but I didn’t need it to do anything super-complicated so Googling formulas for certain things that were beyond me was enough to get it working the way I wanted. It probably would have been easier to start with a template, but I wanted to fully understand how the whole thing worked, although of course I’ve forgotten it by now. 😀 ---
**Author:** ![Heracles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heracles/32/487_2.png) [@Heracles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heracles)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/30 "2021-04-16T17:20:24Z")
I’ve used Quicken for decades, with a couple of multi-year breaks. I download the expenses (mine and our joint accounts) every Saturday morning, and check on stocks and investment funds. I also have a huge spreadsheet for my investments that I maintain once per quarter, and a couple of other spreadsheets to keep up with the monthly payments (did I get my Visa bill on the 10th as usual? Have I pre-programmed a payment for it at my bank, and for what date?). When my hubby complained, I replaced Quicken’s default .WAV for transaction entry (“Ka-ching!”) with a discrete “bloop”. The part that annoys me is that parts of Quicken seem to intentionally break after a few years. My Quicken 2008 stopped downloading stock and index prices at one point. I don’t think the APIs have changed that much. I think it stopped in 2018, which would make for a suspiciously round number. ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/31 "2021-04-16T17:30:00Z")
I used custom workbooks but I’m really strong at Excel and honestly there is nothing complicated in what I’m doing. Just some formulas and formatting in the end. ---
**Author:** ![Tripler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripler/32/21807_2.png) [@Tripler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tripler)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/32 "2021-04-16T18:53:25Z")
I have built my own custom spreadsheets. Currently: - One annual tab for “planned” income/outgoing - One annual tab for “actual” income/outgoing - One tab each, for each pay period, that draws from the “planned” tab’s entries, and populates the “actual” tab’s entries - One tab updated monthly with all of my assets and liabilities (basically my portfolio) It’s not that tough to set up, just lots of cut-and-paste or ‘make a copy’ of tabs. I think Tripler-Nomics rev 9.1 (for 2021) took me all of two hours on a Sunday to set up. That was using last year’s template and making some updates. Excel is nice for me, because of it’s flexibility and customization. I don’t use macros, 'cause I’m not that good of a programmer. But, next rev is going to incorporate a Gantt chart to help me phase out some savings plans that I want to do over the course of the year. Also, my local copy of Excel is ‘off the cloud’ and makes me feel safer, in knowing that the Russians are less likely to hack into it and see my $20/month ice cream habit. Tripler My net worth? “Banana.” ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/33 "2021-04-16T20:04:39Z")
> [@Icarus](#): > > I concede that I may not know how to use the download feature properly, but once I tried and it wanted to go back in history and stomp all over what I had already in there. It ended up a dog’s breakfast and I restored a backup to fix it. So, once burned, twice shy. > > And please, friends of SDMB, please PLEASE don’t let this discussion descend into explaining to me how to do it right. I’m fine with how I do it now, thank you very much. I’m with you, I enter everything manually also, since that gives me more of a hands on feel for what we spent. Actually since Quicken is on my wife’s computer she enters the checks/payments and I balance it every month which finds typos and missing entries. ---
**Author:** ![Icarus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/icarus/32/72_2.png) [@Icarus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Icarus)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/34 "2021-04-16T22:49:42Z")
> [@Tripler](#): > > and see my $20/month ice cream habit. So, you are dieting, no? ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/35 "2021-04-16T22:54:09Z")
I’ve been using an Excel spreadsheet for over 20 years and it seems sufficient for us, along with our bank account online statements. I used to keep a Schedule D Excel spreadsheet back when I invested in stocks and mutual funds, but I no longer need it. ---
**Author:** ![Richard\_Pearse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/richard_pearse/32/13144_2.png) [@Richard\_Pearse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Pearse)\ **Post date:** [April 16, 2021, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/36 "2021-04-16T22:56:08Z")
Yeah, my opinion is that entering transactions manually gets you more in touch with your finances, particularly if you do it shortly after the transactions occur. My personal preference is to enter manually then use the import feature to verify what is already there. ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2021, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/37 "2021-04-17T01:48:25Z")
> [@DCnDC](#): > > I built mine from a completely blank spreadsheet. This. - One tab for checking/savings numbers, another where balances are plotted. - One tab for our mutual funds. - One tab for her work-related retirement accounts. - One tab for my work-related retirement accounts. - One for our mortgage. - One for my car payment. - One big tab that rolls together all the month-by-month balances on one big sheet. - One tab that plots our nest egg over time. There’s a whole other workbook where I’ve got a rough budget laid out. Not something we deliberately follow, more like the other way around, i.e. I laid it out one year based on that year’s expenses, just to understand roughly where our money went. I also have other hypothetical budgets showing how things might look if my wife were unemployed, or if I quit my side job. Still others where I project various retirement scenarios (i.e. when we retire, what SS and pension might look like on those dates, etc.). ---
**Author:** ![Tripler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripler/32/21807_2.png) [@Tripler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tripler)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2021, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/38 "2021-04-17T01:53:35Z")
Had to make room for the $300 steak-and-eggs-for-breakfast-on-weekdays diet. Tripler Filet mignon ain’t cheap, brother! ---
**Author:** ![Dancer\_Flight](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dancer_flight/32/7601_2.png) [@Dancer\_Flight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dancer_Flight)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2021, 5:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/39 "2021-04-17T05:49:32Z")
I use GnuCash for historical tracking / account reconciliation, and a Google Sheets spreadsheet for budgeting. I use other spreadsheets to track my investments and format that data for import into GnuCash (I like having the info in multiple places, I just don’t like entering it more than once). The Budgeting and Investment tracker spreadsheets are all homebrew and all no-cost. ---
**Author:** ![Misnomer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/misnomer/32/14897_2.png) [@Misnomer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Misnomer)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2021, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083/40 "2021-04-17T14:27:56Z")
I replaced my paper checkbook register with Quicken a few decades ago, and still use it to track my savings, checking, and 401(k) accounts. I’m currently debt-free, but whenever I have a car loan (or something) I track it in Quicken as well. I don’t track my credit card spending, though I keep the monthly statements and annual summaries that my credit union provides. I’ve also used a simple Excel sheet for my budget for as long as I can remember; I think even before I started to use Quicken. I lived paycheck-to-paycheck for a _long_ time, and I used the spreadsheet to know how much I could expect to have “left over” each pay period: paycheck amount - the bills due before the next check = what I could spend on food, entertainment, etc. A few years ago my finances finally improved to the point where I don’t need to include numbers anymore, but I still use Excel to track which bills will come out of a given paycheck\*. I project out several months, and I like the look-ahead – and having a reminder of when the quarterly bills (water, trash, etc.) will be coming due. Plus, there have been at least two times when the gas company failed to send me an electronic bill, and my spreadsheet kept me from missing a payment. I also have a tab in the same workbook where I track all of my subscriptions and memberships: how much I paid, the length of the term, when it expires, and whether it will auto-renew. I consider that info to be part of my finances. \*_If I got paid on the same date(s) every month it would be simpler, but I get paid every other week._ [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-of-you-use-software-to-track-finances/940083.md?page=3)