[CS-FSLUG] Confessions of a Dumb Spreadsheet User

[David McGlone]

On Tue, 2011-04-12 at 18:29 -0400, Don Parris wrote:
> @ sjm - I tried GnuCash, and it's ok, except for splitting my paycheck
> - income & taxes, etc.  I managed to do it successfully once, and then
> 2 weeks later, it was like having to learn it all over again.  For me,
> it was pretty frustrating - I didn't have the patience with it that I
> would have liked.  Of course, I'm a little older now, and might try it
> again.
> 
> @ Tim - When I started this spreadsheet project, the idea was to track
> my spending so I could establish a reasonable baseline.  Over the
> first 2 years, I managed to improve my tracking - and, of course, my
> spending habits.  It's been very helpful, to say the least.  I like to
> keep it 'reasonable' and do use it to help me achieve my goals.
> 
> Even so, I tend to dread manually entering the receipts, and my
> favorite thing here is that I can accomplish more with less effort.  I
> only use cash in certain situations, so the ability to simply import
> my transactions is really helpful.  Yes, I still have to categorize,
> but that helps me to verify the transactions.

My wife works at a bank and pretty soon some or all banks will be
cutting down on how much you can spend on your Debt card in a single
day. So far we have heard it will probably be 100.00 for a single day.

I'm contemplating not using a bank anymore because I know some things
that banks try to hide.. The banks are also changing the way they do
things to try and trip people up and rack up overdraft charges. For
instance, my bank has quit processing online bill pay on the weekends
until the following Monday, they have also quit taking debt card
transactions out of your balance immediately and tries to hold them
longer without showing them on their website. This is a tactic to try
and cause overdrafts.

I know plenty more. probably more than I should.

As for software, I can't stand GnuCash, it's just way to overcomplicated
for something so simple and kmymoney is lacking way too far behind and
after a couple years of trying various ones, I've settled on Moneydance
for about the past 5 years. It works great, does probably everything
this thread mentions and isn't overcomplicated.

But.... With the way banks are starting to change the way they do
things, I don't think the software out these days will be able to handle
the changes.

For example banks are going to hold debt card transactions back and not
immediately show them pending, then that means you will need to manually
enter that transaction so you will know what your current balance is,
then when it finally gets entered by the bank and you use your software
to download the transactions, you will have a duplicate and your balance
will be wrong so now you have to remember to delete one of them
transactions.

Or better yet, your software catches a duplicate and asks you what you
want to do, and you start hallucinating! ;-)