OT: personal accounting programme ??

reply.www.geocities.com/jessamy_thompsonhttp://uk.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/jessamy_thompson/my_photos> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I use Quiken Basic. I use it primarily for the check register function and ease of reconciling statements. Get's done in a FLASH (when I actually take the time to input everything). I probably have about 6-10 accounts that I track. It's got alot of reporting/reminder functions as well. You don't need to go to the expense of Quick Books. The Quicken Basic is more than adequate. I've seen a couple of others and most seem to be geared towards 'accountants' and much more difficult to work with.

Good luck in your search.

Kim in NJ

I agree with Kim. Being a professional bookkeeper and used about 1/2 doz. different programs over the years, I would tell you to first check with your bank to see if you can get online banking. I am currently using this and it works marvelous. You put all your creditors in the database and when a bill comes in you just bring up that person, and type the amount and date in the blocks provided and your check or auto payment goes through. You can always look back to see what you paid, you have a running balance of your account and it is very safe. If your bank doesn't offer this service then I say Quicken is good enough if you don't know excel to build a spreadsheet for yourself. Something very very easy is to enter your bills on a calendar (outlook has one, yahoo has one and gmail has one, all free.) You enter your bills (rent due, car pmt, etc. On a date perhaps 1 week before it is due, then make it recurring. Every month it will come up on the same date and send you a reminder. That is a very simple way of reminding yourself what is due when.

Jessamy, I don't know whether you're talking about doing your own accounts or those for a business. If the former, I use Quicken and like it very much. I have just one bank account, but I've set up half a dozen in Quicken so as to be able to "hide" money away from myself as I save up for this or that.

I also keep track of a couple of credit cards in there. I write down every charge we make and always know exactly what our total is, so paying it off each month is very simple.

Quicken has a function where it will remind you to pay whatever bills you'd like to be reminded of, and I find that very useful.

Reconciling the accounts each month is *very* easy and takes just minutes to do.

HTH. :)

Thanks Naomi for your suggestions but (there's always a but isn't there LOL) online banking doesn't keep track of what goes in and out of my wallet so won't do all that I need it to do - my bank does do online but that's only good for what is actually in the account and I can't see what my overall totals are without getting out the calculator and adding it all up.

thanks I'll look into it :-)

I'm not worried about how complicated it is as I used to be a bookkeeper in my past working life and have worked with both of the major bookkeeping programmes here and actually helped set up the SAP for a firm I worked for when they changed from Exact but for just me neither programme are worth the expense LOL

it's just for little old me but I need to keep grip on spending and watching *every* penny works best

I'll have a peek at quicken and see if it suits me :-) thanks!

hey Jess, i just googled 'free accounting program' and got a heap of results. even one on microsoft for 2007. says for small businesses in usa but thats probly just the tax part of it. should work for you or something free, safe and reliable should. who is it says google is your friend, lol. hugz, jeanne

thanks Jeanne but the only free ones I found only supported one account and I need to be able to track 3 :-S

i'm not sure i follow what you need? three accts? more info jess. jeanne

i'm probly just not clued up on this stuff. i thot like in a word processing program you can have many different documents at the same time. cant you do that with acct's software too? name each one different to cover different tasks. shrug, jeanne

most free software's only let you set up one bank account so if you have more you have to buy the full version so if I have to pay I might as well get something good ;-)

I also use Quicken. Great program, but I hate Intuit. :)

You can get a free 60-day trial of the program here:

Hi Jessamy,

I use the very basic Quicken and it does all that I need it to do, especially when my girls were at school. I was able to keep track of every cent I spent and was able to see exactly how much money I spent.

Another way you could do it is with Excel - I use that for working out my budgeting and family history sorting.

Good luck with whatever you choose.

That's too bad. I can do all kinds of reports from my bank, without using a calculator! LOL. So, if I wanted to know how much I paid to XYZ, I can just run it.....

It depends how complicated you want to make it, but we keep track of spending and income on an Excel spreadsheet. morag

On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:13:00 -0500, Jessamy wrote (in article ):

I use Quicken for my household stuff, like the checkbook, etc.

Maureen

I've used Quicken Basic for a long time. I am one of those people who like to know where all the money is going. It allows you to set up as many accounts as you like, and what I like is to track spending, using the categories. You can make sub-categories too, so at any time I can track DH's golf expenses or my quilting supplies, magazine purchases, clothing, etc. I used to do it all with paper and pencil, but this is so much easier!

I use Quicken. It's easy to enter expenses, easy to transfer between accounts, and easy to reconcile. Plus it's really nice at tax time to be able to pull out the deductible expenses by category.

Julia in MN