Tuesday, February 1, 2011

How To Know If A Scorpio Man

monthly cash check

Since 2004 I use for my monthly cash check an OpenOffice spreadsheet. (Before that it was an Excel table.) Each month has a column and each row is assigned a category. After a year I add a total column and leave it free to list one column.
The lines are divided into two major groups, income and expenditure. These are divided again into wage and salary, fringe activities and special revenues (eg tax refunds or eBay sales), as well as living quarters, mobility, insurance and fees.

hacker since 2004, I always end of the month all bank transfers and all cash transactions which I can still remember and which I still have receipts in this table, so I have a rough overview of my financial status. It was never perfect, and it has me by the end of the month means even a cost to two hours of work, but there were never really better, the "big ones" were to me sometimes too expensive, some too confusing, and / or were not maintained properly .

Then I iFinance and Saldomat discovered.
was the main argument for both programs, they were first, cheap, small and manageable (no monsters as Quicken, etc.) and fulfilled the second of two independent targets and were independently usable. I went through my Saldomat balances up to date now in sight and may, if necessary account information to import iFinance and then evaluate.

have further convinced me:
  • automated online synchronization with the bank - now an obvious choice
  • automatic and flexible allocation of booking categories, including post-
  • support of various account types
  • optional ignore postings between accounts in evaluations (we have a joint account) missing
  • Paypal indirect support (through CSV import)
following me:
  • The reports and graphics are very pretty, but sometimes graphically to consuming, and thus confusing.
  • A direct connection to popular online payment services (Paypal, Moneybookers, ...) would be nice.
  • Querying Fund. Shares may iFinance already.
But all in all, this is a substantial improvement over the old method (which admittedly was a bit dusty).

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