Do you do a yearly audit on yourself?

Zola.

I just did my first 'financial audit', where I took all transactions from our joint bank account in 2016 and put it into a google document, breaking it down by months.

This was a fairly straight forward copy/paste process, but I could do with splitting these final numbers into 12 pie charts to show where the money has gone to give it some context.

This would of course take a lot more time. Is this the best way to do it, or am I missing a trick? :beer:

dreaming

I keep records of my spending each month broken down by categories. Only takes a few minutes to do each week once the spreadsheets are set up and it all feeds into a yearly "master copy" which is then used in January to plan the budget for the coming year. I also "reconcile" it to the bank accounts and once caught a rather large bank error. It is quite manual and could probably be done much quicker by someone techie (e.g. my daughter) but it works for me. Some people think I am a bit anal about tracking my money (I am!) but I am on a limited income (retired on company pension) but have no debts and even manage to save a little, run my house and car, and follow my hobbies (which are admittedly low cost). As I said, it suits me - I don't understand people who have no money/large debts but say they don't know where it has gone. I know exactly where my money is but still manage to have a little splurge every now and then. Possibly if you have a large disposable income then it doesn't matter so much.

agrinnall

No, but as all of my income and expenditure (other than cash purchases) are already in MS Money I could do an annual budget in seconds with a few clicks.

mgdavid

dreaming wrote: »

I keep records of my spending each month broken down by categories. .....

Bank with Barclays, their current account provides this facility for you. :beer:

dreaming

mgdavid wrote: »

Bank with Barclays, their current account provides this facility for you. :beer:

It was Barclays which made the major error on my account I mentioned and I left them very shortly after as I was appalled at their service over the problem. Judging by the item in the News section of MSE it seems nothing much has changed.
As I now use multiple bank accounts I find my way works best for me.

Gers

Lloyds have Money Manager and TSB has Money Planner - both have pie charts of spends.

Zola.

I wish Santander provided this!

Zola.

agrinnall wrote: »

No, but as all of my income and expenditure (other than cash purchases) are already in MS Money I could do an annual budget in seconds with a few clicks.

Is that software easy to use? And can it still be downloaded today?

agrinnall

Zola. wrote: »

Is that software easy to use? And can it still be downloaded today?

Download from here.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-GB/download/details.aspx?id=20738

You do need to be quite rigorous entering your incomings and outgoings as they happen otherwise you'll find yourself missing things, and you need to reconcile with statements on a regular basis, but the big advantage over the single bank offerings referred to above is that it will record multiple current, savings and credit card accounts so you can see it all in one place.

fromtheshires

Zola. wrote: »

I wish Santander provided this!

There is an app called spendalytics in the App store. Its not perfect but its better than nothing.

Anthorn

Depends on what you mean by "audit": My financial accounts and utilities are switched during January and February and I usually save money when I do that. This year though I may do an additional switch: I switched from Peterborough Energy / Ovo fixed tariff to Ebico / SSE variable tariff this month February 2017 but Ebico / SSE is set to change their prices during April, 2017. In addition I took on a few BT cards and paid off and closed existing cards which saved £3000 on my available credit while credit utilisation remains low.

So yes I audit during the early part of the year but that auditing is ongoing throughout the year.