Keeping Track of savings etc - Spreadsheet or Software ?

darren72

How does everyone keep track of all the different accounts they hold, how much is held in them and any maturity dates, etc.

Are you all using your own spreadsheet or something similar ?

I've been using a very basic spreadsheet but looking to do something a bit more as I have lots of old accounts on it too that are no longer needed (but need the interest info for tax returns).

Does anyone use any software/spreadsheets they can recommend for this purpose ?

In_For_A_Penny_2

Vote for Banktivity. OS X only though.

ColdIron

AceMoney and Google calendar works for me

TrustyOven

I use KMyMoney on Linux.
Though it should be available on Windows (https://sourceforge.net/projects/kmymoney2/files/KMyMoney-Windows/4.8.0/kmymoney-x86-setup-4.8.0.exe/download)

and also for Mac on "MacPorts" (https://www.macports.org/ports.php?by=name&substr=kmymoney) althought it looks like you need to compile it from source given that they list development tools as dependencies.

Main site (including download links and screenshots etc): https://kmymoney.org/
and https://kmymoney.org/screenshots.php

veryintrigued

Simple spreadsheet works a treat for me.

Different row for each product with those at the top being the ones that mature the 'soonest'.

george4064

I find that a simple excel spreadsheet works fine. I dont see any need to get a fancy app or software.

jimjames

Still using Microsoft Money, now free and still works well

Alexland

Spreadsheet with summary tab presented as a balance sheet and tabs for each product with actuals and forecast.

TrustyOven

george4064 wrote: »

I find that a simple excel spreadsheet works fine. I dont see any need to get a fancy app or software.

I suppose you could build a ledger and accounts system in a spreadsheet. But it would be quite time consuming. I guess double-entry ledger would mean one sheet per account, and that's just for the ledger, then maybe a sheet per account for various metadata. Unless you wanted to have a flat ledger that has 'to' and 'from' columns that link to another sheet with your account metadata? I guess in that situation you'd need more complex reporting to only trigger if from or to was for a specific account you want to look at? You could do Now()-30 etc for various reports, but that's a sheet per report? Add into the mix investments and then you have brokerage accounts for your investment account etc so more sheets needed.

I suppose categories would be in one sheet.

Definitely not a simple spreadsheet as you suggest.

So as you can see, doing this in a spreadsheet is possible, but is probably beyond the level of effort that most people want to expend.

adindas

veryintrigued wrote: »

Simple spreadsheet works a treat for me.

Different row for each product with those at the top being the ones that mature the 'soonest'.

Same here. At the moment it fulfills my needs to manage 34 RS + 7 RS ISA.

What I found good about spreadsheet is that you have a lot of flexibility ad full in control of what you want to do. Adding notes, adding line column, adding tab, etc. But I have not tried other software so cannot comment it.

DawlishDilbert

I use Moneydance (available for all platforms I believe) as in my opinion it handles investments the best.

I configure and group my accounts to take into account the maturity dates. e,g, a Noddyville Building Society account which expires on 12th April 2018 would be called '180412 - Noddyville 1-year saver'. Then it will sort by maturity date.

Other accounts are named and sorted by the interest rate so that '1.2% Anybank saver' will be listed before '2.1% Anybank saver' in my list.