My Family’s Money

In my goals for the new year I mentioned that I wanted to improve my financial tracking “software” and get it to the point where it knows where all my money is at down to the penny. To help all my avid and veracious readers know a little bit more about what I mean by that I figured I should probably give those phantoms a little bit of information about my awesome and awe-inspiring tracking arrangement.

What I Got
Practically on the day my wife and I got back from our honeymoon I built our first financial spreadsheet. It was simple and easy, and it gave me something to do at work when I got really bored that was both productive and useful. At first all it did was track when and how much we spent, but since then it has evolved into a fairly substantial system of interlocking sheets. In its current state we can:

• Record the basics: When, how much, and in what category each of our purchases occurs
• Analise our spending: Through the power of vlookup and hide I have summed each of our spending by category into a manageable mass of information that helps us see where we are at in our monthly budget, where our current pace of spending will land us at the end of the month, and how much we spend per day on each of our categories of spending.
• Track how our regular expense saving plan is going: We track how much we put into these “accounts” and how much we use from them in one manageable interface
• Get a bird’s eye view of our spending, saving, and giving: this overview worksheet is linked to each month and gathers all the pertinent data into one place where it is easily digested. Here I can see what types of spending trends emerge, create cool charts, and learn that we spend a little over 70% of our combined income on things that we absolutely can’t do without and that we save nearly 23% of the same (hurray for our side!).

What I Learned
In creating all this spreadsheet glory, which I am sure is surprisingly similar to very good and very time efficient financial software tools like Quicken (a.k.a. Boring-icken) – I already mentioned why I don’t use it here – I have learned a couple of things:

1. Make it easy to automatically update things on your overview worksheet by making your monthly spreadsheet’s naming conventions easy. This not only includes the name of the file (2007.12_Income_Tracker), but also the name of each individual sheet (List, Categories, Funds). This means that all you have to do to add a new month to your master sheet is fill down last months information and do a replace on the month number to get that month rolling.
2. Include plenty of space for your purchases on your basics sheet that lists all your purchases. This helps keep tinkering with that master sheet to a minimum.
3. Make things as easy to see as you can. Your eyes are important for seeing things, make it easy on them.

What Needs to Change
It’s finally time to talk about my goals for improving what I have spent the last seven months building. I simply have to:

• Improve the look of the spreadsheets. There is clutter from a million edits and work-time rabbit trails that needs to be sent to the eternal black abyss where there are neither 1s nor 0s to code them.
• Improve spreadsheet accuracy. I used to know where every penny we had was, but then we got a credit card and it screwed everything up. Now I have to add numbers where I shouldn’t to make them accurately represent reality. I think I may have a working solution to this problem already figured out, but I’ll actually have to have real data to figure that out.
• Make analysis easier. I’m not really sure what else I can do, but the more I look at the numbers the more I see different ways to think about them. Besides, who wouldn’t want to make even MORE graphs. There freakin’ awesome.
• Make it SIMPLE, stupid. In my lust for spreadsheet magnificence I probably did things in a really inefficient or hacky way. In order to achieve this goal I have to overcome the self deception that the way it works now is great or I’ll have to combat my lack of knowledge about how spreadsheets can work. Both won’t be easy to defeat, the first because I don’t really make mistakes and the second because I don’t really need to learn anything new. I guess this goal is already 100% achieved!

So that should bring everyone up to speed on the important stuff about my spreadsheets. Maybe one day I will try and put up some samples so everyone can see just how spectacular they are for themselves.