Money Management Software

patwa_2

Hi. After doing a bit of thinking, I've realised I can't go on like this, just keeping all my account and outgoings info in my head. It's getting really difficult to track direct debits and also to visuallize where my finances will be in say 6 months time, especially now I've entered into all these buy now pay later agreements and got my loan up and running.

I'm partially sighted, otherwise I'd just draw myself a nice set of charts and such.

So was wondering if anyone could suggest good software packages to keep track of all this, and in particular something with some kind of forward projection feature so i can see how much money I'll have in the future? The only limitation is that it must be visually friendly, preferrably in sync with the Windows colour scheme so that it'll revert to my current contrast of white on black.

I did try MS Money 2005 Premium some time ago, but I realise now that a) I didn't have enough information at the time, and b) I didn't have the patience to enter every transaction from my bank statements and actually probably didn't have the right idea about how to go about inputting everything into the program.

Thanks, and a happy new year to you all.

Hussein.

magyar

I've tried loads of different packages including Money, and to be honest my favourite is a good old Excel spreadsheet.

Because, as you say, I don't have the patience to type things in either (although if you have the right bank account it can be downloaded and entered automatically). Generally I think this is over the top for most people; maybe some people need to record everything to the nearest penny, but in practice I find that most things nowadays come out my a/c as direct debits etc. so it's relatively easy to predict what I'm going to spend each month (the variable amount is less than 10% of the overall expense).

What I do is set up one sheet with incomings and outgoings and then another where I look at cash flow - if you PM me your email address I'll happily send you a copy. This can then be extended as long as required into the future to work out how much you will have.

Because it's Excel it will easily sit in with the windows colour schemes.

patwa_2

Hi, thanks for your post, I sent you a message.

Hussein.