When it comes to paying a credit card from a bank account, there doesn't seem to be a simple, efficient way to do this. I can see the transfer option, but I'm not entirely sure it always does what I think I've asked it to do. Secondly the software seems to add balancing transaction if it thinks I've done something wrong. This does not help me get it right, it just covers up a possible mistake. At least that is what it looks like it is doing.
But the biggest headache has been the bank reconciliation process. I think I've finally begun to understand it, but I'm not at all confident that the bottom line number is telling me what I need to know or not. That confidence for me comes directly from the simple ability to see all my payments and incomes checked off against the bank statement and receiving a nice affirming "finished" message. A message I'm struggling to achieve most of the time.
It is also thoroughly confusing to see a credit card statement sometimes showing a positive cleared and statement balance and sometimes a negative one. I think I understand this now. In fact the penny (well we are talking about accounts here) dropped as I lay awake in bed not ten minutes ago.
What I think is happening is that the software is comparing the balances from consecutive statements. If you spent less this month on the credit card than the previous month, this balance will be positive, if you've spent more it will be negative. Now what I actually want to see is a figure that represents what I've spent and what I need to pay, not the difference between what I've spent month on month.
If this is true for the credit card reconciliations then I guess it's true for the current account too. Which means that the numbers I see in the reconciliation window don't actually tell me what I want to know. So I feel more relaxed now about my abject failure to reconcile my bank accounts in a way that makes sense to me, but at least I may be getting it right more than I thought I was getting it wrong.
I still might have a look at Quicken 2007, or worse still, I might just install Parallels and go back to Microsoft Money, perish the thought!
1 comment:
Up until recently I was using an my original version of Quicken 98 delux (as I didn't want an ongoing subscription arrangement with a newer version of Quicken) - but over the past few months I've been using GNUcash which is a freeware application (can be run on a usb pen). I've not got it working in a way that replicates the set up I had in Quicken.
The only down side I've found is it can be a little slow to load at startup but I tend to enter expenditure on a weekly or so basis so it's not a big deal.
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