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Hugo Hamel
Hugo Hamel

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How do you track your finances?

Recently attended a workshop, and I'm curious to know how you track your finances. Personally, I've built a custom spreadsheet, and I'm happy with that, but I'd love to see how other people are doing it.

  1. Do you use a spreadsheet? Did you build it yourself? Did you buy one that was already done for you?
  2. Do you use an accounting software (Quickbooks, Xero, Zoho, etc.)?
  3. How do you like your current solution? Is it too complicated? Is it too overkill in terms of features for your needs?
  4. What would make it better for you?

In the workshop, they recommended also using tracking tools like Mint to follow all your expenses, not just business, but also, personal.
I'd be curious to know how many other people track it all to the penny like this.

Top comments (15)

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tqbit profile image
tq-bit • Edited

A classic spreadsheet, actually.

  • One page for insurances
  • One page for recurring cost of living (e.g. energy bills, rent)
  • One page for bigger buys (e.g. new TV, furniture)

I generally don't spend much money on impulse purchases. Kind of inherited the 'turn every penny twice' mentality from my parents. Except for groceries, 95% of my monthly costs are in one of the three above pages.

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hugohamelcom profile image
Hugo Hamel

That make sense! Is there anything you feel is missing from your spreadsheet?

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tqbit profile image
tq-bit • Edited

Tbh, not really. I often thought about developing a small crawling script that exports my expenses, like with puppeteer and perhaps a telegram bot. Then again, I have like 6 regular and on average 8 non-regular transactions per month. Might give it another shot once I have kids though.

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ryanmcslomo profile image
Ryan McCallum • Edited

I'm a big fan of Fidelity Full View, I like it more than Mint since Mint has trouble automatically tracking some things (Fidelity does as well, but is a lil more consistent IMO). I also use a Google Apps Script to convert my purchases from Fidelity to a spreadsheet, where it's easier to view and keep track of just the way I like it: dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/up...

My budget sheet

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hugohamelcom profile image
Hugo Hamel

Amazing, I'll definitively take a look into it! Thank you so much!!!

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hugohamelcom profile image
Hugo Hamel

That would have been the type of solution I would have looked into, but the problem is that it doesn't support my European bank, only my Canadian bank. Thanks for sharing, it's really valuable :)

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meatboy profile image
Meat Boy

Simple and free Notion doc. Nothing fancy or overcomplicated. :)

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hugohamelcom profile image
Hugo Hamel

Do you feel like there's anything missing with it?

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marcandreh profile image
Marc-Andre

I really enjoy using MoneyMoney and GetMyInvoices for tracking our expenses, transactions and invoices.

  • MoneyMoney lists and categorizes all transactions from our bank & credit card accounts automatically. This gives us a good overview about liquidity and is our golden source for every incoming and outgoing Euro. What I really appreciate: It only costs EUR 29 one-time – no subscription.
  • GetMyInvoices stores all our incoming invoices via upload or email, reads and categorizes them automatically via OCR and exports them at the end of every month to our accountant.

We also tried "more sophisticated" tools but in terms of pricing and effectivity, those two really match our needs.

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hugohamelcom profile image
Hugo Hamel

Interesting! MoneyMoney only in german? And can it access both Canadian and European accounts?

Where do you store your invoices and expenses afterwards with GetMyInvoices?

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marcandreh profile image
Marc-Andre

Both tools are available in English too!

MoneyMoney supports all major European banking interfaces (FinTS/HBCI & PSD2), as well as PayPal, Wise etc.

What banking interfaces are there in Canada?

GetMyInvoices is the main data storage for our invoices. Whenever we search for any specific invoice, we can use the extracted meta-data (invoice no, issued date, amount) or even a full-text search and download it from there.

Both tools offer spreadsheet exports whenever a custom analysis or forecast is needed.

Actually I didn't want to advertise any specific product, but in general we rely on those two processes:

  1. that collects and categorizes transactions from all accounts
  2. that stores and organizes all invoices for taxation and accounting
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hugohamelcom profile image
Hugo Hamel

Just looked and MoneyMoney doesn't support my European bank :(

It's a good question for Canada, I don't really know...

Thank you for clarifying, that really helps :)

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andrewbaisden profile image
Andrew Baisden

A spreadsheet but if I could find a decent app I would switch.

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