So, instead of buying software to deal with keeping tabs on where money is being spent for our business, I decided to play around with Excel a bit and come up with something with it and put that 'training' I got in high school to some use after all this time.

http://tifreakware.net/tifreak8x/misc/TemplateRegister.xlsx



To start out, you need Excel 2010 at the very least. Make sure you're on the January tab, enter in your starting amount for the year, and start entering in the values into their appropriate columns.

I set it up so that it will look for either a credit or a debit, so it will know if it needs to add or subtract to the current overall total. It also bounces that value from month to month, all the way to December, so you never have to try to make sure you input your starting numbers from one month to the next. If a debit makes your account go negative, as shown in the first screenshot, it will display the text in red.

Thoughts?

Sometimes it's nice to plot running totals. You should use proper date formats for that (and then DATEDIF command might come in handy). My grocery spreadsheet from senior year looks like this:


My mom contributed $650 because I saved her a bunch of money by getting off the meal plan, so I tracked how much of that I had left before cutting into personal funds.

Well, this was set for business purposes. We're supposed to fill out sheets on deposits, checks and efts, and this will hopefully make such things easier to fill out. Plus, normal people can use it as well. graphs aren't exactly needed, as they don't impress the IRS people. :p

For normal people usage, the graphs are nice because it helps you get a a visual sense of how quickly you're spending.

I get a good visual sense of that by how quickly the total I have reaches 0 :< lol A shame it happens so quickly at the beginning of each month. I personally use quicken for my own stuff, keep the shop separate from mine. And since the accountant we use doesn't have a way to open quicken, I figured this would be the best solution all around.

I honestly don't think we had the ability to do graphs back when I learned how to do this a decade ago. If we did, it wasn't something that got covered. We spent like 2 weeks per office program at a time.