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I have been using my American Express Gold Card for a year now and I wanted to get a breakdown of my spending pattern (graphs, charts,etc). I use it for everything (gas, groceries, bills- everything except my mortgage payments)
Lately I have been noticing that my spending is increasing and thus I wanted to find out where my money is going.
The American Express website gives me the option to download transactions to Quicken, Quickbooks, Money, etc. I dont have these programs and I dont know if its worthwhile to purchase them just to view my spending.
I do have Microsoft Excel but downloading to that just puts the items in columns. Any suggestions?
Actually, now that I think of it, it may be a good idea to purchase one of those software programs. I realized that I also want to track my payments on my two cars, etc.
Any recommendations for either- Money, Quicken, Quickbooks, etc?
I in the process of starting up a business but this spending tracker will be mainly for personal spending for now (unless there is a product that does both)
When I log into my AMEX account, then click on either "recent activity" or "online statement" it gives you a list view (a regular looking statement with charges listed).....If you look directly to right of that (still on the left side of the screen) it says "graph view". Click on that and it will show you food, gas, merchandise, etc. You can even create your own categories and go back as far as you want. AMEX does the rest for you. It gives you a gaph view, line view, % and everything. No need to purchase any software if that is the only card you use and want to track.
I have used Quicken, Money and Quickbooks. Quicken is by far the easiest to use and the basic version, which is all you need, isn't expensive at all. Often you can get a free version if you use Turbo Tax. I HATE the Money program.
Anyone care to share their thoughts on yodlee.com or mint.com to monitor their expenses and incomes?
I have found yodlee to be helpful. Mint.com is annoying because some of their log-ins for accounts I have are incorrect, so it won't log into my account. I informed them on 3 different occasions that they have the wrong link to log into those accounts and they did not correct it. Send me a canned response about checking to make sure I used the correct user ID and password for the account. HELLO - I'm not the problem, the fact that your link is not the correct one to log in is the problem. They never corrected it or apologized or seem to care, so I decided I was done with them.
Now I am trying freshbooks and I am liking it so far.
I've used Quicken too and maybe I'll try it again, but it was getting me all confused. It would download from my bank accounts and the balance they showed and the real balance never matched and it was just too confusing/frustrating for me.
I don't like how bank statements download into Quicken or Quickbooks-at least from our bank. I use my debit card for almost everything and the bank puts a numerical code in front of the store name so then you have to go in and edit every entry. I just did that the old fashioned way and put each entry in manually. I found it was less time consuming that way.
As for your balances not matching-that has more to do with how quickly things clear the bank vs the program. If you only enter things that have cleared the bank then your balances should match but if you enter everything you will just have to subtract the amounts that haven't cleared to get the numbers to match.
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Good Software for everything
