Tracking income & expenses

Posted by Drizzt

October 23, 2006

I think tracking your expenses with Quicken takes 3 easily steps.

Create your expense and income.
Daily entry of expense and income.
Monitor what you use periodically.

1.Create your expense and income. This is important. How much additional effort you spend later on this depend on how detail you do this up. In the figure below you will see an example of what i use (there are some that are out of this view, but i guess you can figure out yourself). A detailed and well thought out categorizing will ensure that you do not have to create redundent category somewhere down the road. Where to find the category list…. Editing the category list… 2. Daily entry of expense and income. It only takes less than 5 mins a day to do this later on. you can do it first thing in the morning the next day, after dinner on the same day, any way you like. Once the categorization is done, entry is easy except for those routine transactions, which i will show you next time. 3. Monitor what you use periodically. This is the end product of all your hard work in data entry every day. From the reports generated, you will be able to tell where you have been spending your precious pay, whether you have spent too much of it on clubbing, whether it is high time you take a holiday when you realise your annual holiday spending is near ZERO. It is not good to monitor what you should be reducing all the time. U should be looking out on where you are not spending as well. Being a miser ain’t good for personal development and people around you as well.