After two full nights of manly struggle, Accounting Software submits to my indomitable will.
All I wanted was a single sheet of paper with a couple of pictures on it. Like, maybe, a graph showing my net worth and how it’s gone up or down this year - yeah, that’d be nice. And, oh, I know - how about a graph that shows me if I’ve spent more than I’ve made in any month; and how much my debt increased or decreased in a month; perhaps any contributions to investments I’ve made; and, just for kicks, a line showing the result all this activity has had on how much actual money I have.
You know - stuff like P&L, Sources and uses of Cash, and Cash Flow, in one chart. Three bars and a trend line. Easy.
Being an Excel-loving numbers geek as I am, creating the charts and associated spreadsheet’s easy. Year-to-Date stuff calculates automagically; the cells I don’t have to fill in, I colored yellow ‘cause it looks nice and makes me happy.
Now all I need is data. Easy enough - I’ve been running Quicken for years. Lots of reports in Quicken. No problem.
That was two nights ago. Nearly a dozen late-night hours spent creating reports, checking settings (Exclude Internal Transfers? Include All Transfers? Cleared? Reconciled? All?), clicking Accounts on and off, double-checking Categories, comparing I&E-style vs. Cash-Flow style reports against each other line by freaking line. . . after all this work, I have my single-page Graphical Financial Reporting System (now I’m trying to come up with other words that fit the acronym GFRS - any suggestions?)
I vaguely remember Genghis Babe coming in at 1 in the morning last night, kissing me on the top of my head and wandering off to bed. She figures my obsession with finding that last $1.89 discrepancy between two reports is a lot better than, say, hanging out in bars with strange women.
So now I have ‘em memorized in Quicken: Monthly I&E, capturing the big picture, all accounts, all categories; Monthly Changes to Debt, to pick up increases in debt (a source of cash, a big blind spot in my early attempts at this) and payments to principle; Monthly Transfers to Investments; Retained Cash, to validate my spreadsheet calculations (P&L - changes to debt and investment funding should equal the change in Cash position, don’tchaknow); Monthly Cash Flow, to pick up the transfers from Cash Accounts to Debt and Investment accounts - really just another cross-check; and finally Net Worth.
So that’s, lessee, six reports. And two of them are just there to provide check figures to make sure my spreadsheet hasn’t lost its mind. I figure 10 minutes at the end of each month, type a total of 5 numbers into my spreadsheet, and my nifty multi-colored graphs are ready to go.
Ha! Take that, Quicken. Bring on Turbo-Tax!