Life with GnuCash
Using GnuCash has been a real joy over the past two weeks. I'm now very comfortable with my money because I know to the penny where the money comes from and goes to. Plus, exact bookkeeping will let me more carefully budget how I want to spend what money isn't being spent on bare necessities.
In addition to easy reconciliation and budgeting, however, I'm seeing areas where I need to improve my habits when buying. In particular, I'm seeing discrepancies on my receipts that should have been caught while I was standing at the register. For instance, Chipotle charged me for two drinks instead of one last week. And Burger King charged me an anomalous $0.44 more than the total on the register receipt when they ran my card.
Two weeks is clearly not a baseline, so I look forward to seeing trends emerge in the coming months. In the meantime, I'll work on changing my routines at the register so Jewel's self checkout machine can't short me a dollar and penny in change ever again.
3 comments:
I decided to try out GnuCash today. I set up my accounts and entered in the transactions from my checkbook. I'm still in the process of figuring out how everything works, but from what I've seen so far it looks awesome. I think I might continue using it...
I hope you do; I've found GnuCash to be among the most useful pieces of software I've picked up in a very long time. I'm actually going to be showing my family how to use it sometime this week, so they can benefit from it, too.
By the way: when entering transactions, I now usually assign a number to each transaction, using this formula:
<last digit of the year>
<two-digit month number>
<two digits, incrementing>
This month, for instance, the numbers include 71203, 71204, and 71205. I put the number in the GnuCash's "Num" column and write the number on the receipt. If there's a discrepancy between my bank statement and GnuCash, I can find the receipt using the obvious number I wrote on it (rather than by checking the date, price, or vendor).
It does indeed look very useful. I like the way it treats transactions and how it can easily be used to keep track of cash as well.
Thanks for the tip, I'll keep that in mind.
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