Finance Q&A

Setting up a budget ?

Q. I need to set up a new accounting/budget system for my family. I've been doing this in Excel for years. I have a 'cash' account spreadsheet with week by week summaries of expenses (really a payment schedule), with budget forecasts for same. The whole thing is filled out at the beginning of the year in red, then the actuals are entered in black. The problem is that I have to do a lot of double entry. At tax time, my spreadsheet isn't 'complete', so I have to go back and enter into a separate spreadsheet all my checks, my wife's checks and both our credit cards. If I'm going to do all this typing, I'd rather just enter the checks once, then do the 'budget status report' from the check/credit card ledger.

A. Yes. This is precisely the kind of use I put Money to. It provides a database of "Accounts" that match real world things like Checking, Savings, Discover, and First Mortgage. In those, you can enter (or download in certain circumstances and if you fell lucky--see below) transaction information like what you spent on gasoline yesterday and what your paycheck was and what its elements were. With this data, Money can aggregate and report these transactions across accounts as required. How much did you have in Taxes:Social Security? It's a simple problem. Money also supports budgeting with an internal tool it supports tracking investments for things like summaries of capital gains and so forth. YMMV and others who frequent this newsgroup might have alternate advice. Few have unqualified praise for it compared to the prior 12 versions. M04 is still available from some places, but it's rapidly getting scarce. We can only hope that M06 is an improvement on M05. But I'm not holding my breath. Quicken is an alternate product in this space. If you are into Linux, GnuCash is maybe 75% of Money's functional capability. But I'm not sure they have a budgeting capability. If you go the Money route, be sure and post back with questions: many people need a while to get past the "light bulb moment" when they understand how things like Transfers work and why they are what they are. Also, my recommendation to new Money users is to skip all of the electronic download crap until you really understand how Money works. M05 makes this harder to do because it pretty much leads you down that path and you have to know to take the exit ramps rather than let it set this all of--sort of, that's part of the problem--on your behalf. Some people disagree with this recommendation. Hundreds of postings each and every week from people have one problem or another stemming from trying to make this electronic integration work confirm my belief in its wisdom.

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