I don’t think the technology of how the data is stored is particularly relevant to the discussion. There’s nothing wrong with spreadsheets for storing data.
The issue is end user functionality. I use all sorts of features in Quicken that are just out of the box, whereas in a spreadsheet, I’d have to think how I’m going to do that.
You can certainly do a global search with ease in Quicken … searching every field of every transaction of every account you’ve ever had. Can’t say it is one mouse click, because I just type ctrl-h to invoke that search.
What I’d miss the most in a spreadsheet only approach would be transaction downloads and automatic reconciliation. Or do you use Tiller for that? (I’ve never used Tiller, but I understand it does that).
I input my transactions manually. It’s a conscious choice to give up efficiency for better security (my spreadsheet software is prohibited from establishing network connections). I don’t have a whole lot of transactions and I don’t spend too much time inputting them, so it’s not a problem for me. I would have probably done the same with Quicken, cause I don’t trust anyone with my usernames & passwords.
Understood. I was merely opining that asserting that database technology provides a superior account management tool compared to a spreadsheet is not the best way to approach the discussion. What matters is the functionality delivered to the user. I should have quoted glitch99 to make that clear.
I think this is more important than everything else. I also manually enter transactions. I can then compare my balance with the bank’s balance - that’s the only way to actually reconcile an account.
I understand you use your spreadsheets as a database like any other finance software. It’s actually pretty impressive that you’ve created something that can hold up to adding transaction after transaction, account after account, year after year, without formulas and links breaking. I guess that my point was more that you’ve spent unknown time building and maintaining a solution out of spare parts, when there are numerous off-the-shelf solutions that do the same thing that cost next to nothing in both time and money. At least in my mind, it equates to using spreadsheets to produce your tax return each year, rather than using the various existing tax prep software.
I, too, manually enter my spend transactions. Doing so is how I answered the concern that using a credit card made spending too easy. If you had to count out cash or update a check register, the act of spending money would have more friction. Anyway, that was the thinking 30 years ago when simply not using cash wasn’t as common as it is today. And I’ve stuck to it.
For brokerage dividend payments, interest earned, etc., these get downloaded and entered before I otherwise know about them, so I don’t usually enter those. However, each and every transaction is reviewed before it is entered.
I use Mint. The UI is slow and clunky, it takes them a long time to add new FIs or to update them if the login procedure changes, and customer service is terrible. But I prefer a cloud service so my SO and I can both log in to view and update things.
I tried Personal Capital after reading this thread and it works so much better. But, there’s no budgeting option and that’s the most important thing Mint provides for us. We have just a few high-level budgets, but we rely on them to monitor spending patterns and habits.
ETA: Investment accounts I monitor with Schwab’s tools, which mainly involves logging in roughly quarterly to rebalance.
I actually tried using Microsoft Money back in the day, and I’ve looked at other budgeting and money management software over the years (like YNAB and Money Manager Ex). I found that they weren’t as flexible as I wanted them to be. Some of the built-in budget categories couldn’t be removed, for example, and setting up the categories and sub-categories was burdensome. I found that this is easier to do in spreadsheets, and since I made them myself and have full access to everything, they’re much, much more flexible.
I never learned Quicken, but I’ve looked at it a few times and found it overwhelming. I suspect it’s easier to learn spreadsheets (MS Office, LibreOffice, or Google Sheets) than Quicken for someone just starting out. This is why I think spreadsheets should be given serious consideration by anyone trying to figure out how to manage their finances. There’s lots of free and easily customizable sample spreadsheets online for budgeting and keeping track of expenses. I don’t mind sharing my “layouts” or ideas if anyone is interested, I just can’t easily provide everything as that might take some time to prepare. Also the way I track things may not be the way other people want to track things.
That’s very true. Even for myself, my need changed over the years from more focus on budgeting early on to more focus on account management and validating transactions now.
The unicorn is something that does all of this with great flexibility, simplicity, low hassle, and low cost.
ya, I’m using Quicken more like a fancy spreadsheet so it’s just not worth paying for the “online” abilities. It still works to a degree even after the online abilities is gone now when my “subscription” expired. I just like to have the ability to search through it for stuff I bought 10 years ago. Now I think about it’s more a database that I need. I can probably make something in MS Access but I’ll try gnucash first. No sense reinventing the wheel if I don’t have to.
I like Excel for all this - as long as it’s only for personal use and not huge amounts of data, a spreadsheet can be a flexible database or whatever else you want. Of course I use an older version, so the price is right but the cost is figuring out how to install an old Windows VM on my more current operating system.
LibreOffice Calc is free and should be very compatible with Excel, especially an older version of Excel. I started with Excel and switched to Calc about a decade ago (was OpenOffice).
But installing Windows VM shouldn’t be hard if you have the installation disk. Use VirtualBox. Make sure the VM does not have any network adapters, else an unpatched OS could get infected within seconds of connecting to the internet unless you have a properly secured network.
+1 for gnucash. As long as you can get your head around double-entry bookkeeping, you should be good to go. They also have a very active mailing list and it’s been actively maintained for, I think, 20+ years.
My problem with the Excel sheets I looked at is importing transactions and getting stock/mutual fund quotes in. I have about 15 transactions per day across a dozen accounts, plus about a dozen investment accounts. And I’m not talking about all inactive accounts I still want to keep a tab on to make sure no activity happens on them. So how do you import them all into Excel? Manual input is not an option for me since I don’t have the time to do so.
I don’t import quotes for positions and trades. If I care, maybe once a month or once a quarter I write down the account value and call it a day. My brokers have performance tracking if I’m looking for that.
I don’t know how to do it in excel or calc, but google sheets has a function to get live quotes – googlefinance(). It’s not 100% reliable (sometimes some quotes go down), but there’s also a way to get pieces of any pages online using importhtml(), so you could get quotes from nasdaq.com, for example, if googlefinance() function stopped working.
I concur that lots of daily transactions would make spreadsheets a problem. I suppose you could download CSVs and import them, but it’s not the same. The way I categorize my transactions is not the same way they’d be categorized in the CSV, if at all. I enter my transactions manually, usually on the day of. When I go away on vacation, I add up all expenses together when I get back and just input it once in the “vacation” category (because the details are not something I care to track).
My other issue with excel sheets and CSVs is that the columns order in the file exported from your bank are not likely to line up perfectly without some editing with your own columns (unless you make them so but that could vary from bank to bank as well).
In terms of transaction categories, I have yet to see a perfect system from them. Quicken is as close as it gets WHEN it works since it remembers if you manually override the category for that particular merchant. But it’s still very hard to import it and have it totally correct so I end up manually editing some of them which is time-consuming unfortunately. Same in personal capital.
There are calls you can use in excel, but they’re snapshot, not streaming quotes, and may be delayed. You should be able to find solutions on Google. Also, I think IB has APIs you can use, but I’ve only heard about it and that’s way beyond my technical expertise.
Shandril - out of curiosity, why do you have so many investment accounts? Or are they all with the same broker, just different account types?
On the changes to the columns etc, you can try to look into power query to automate some of the process, but to me it sounds like a lot of work.
(because the details are not something I care to track).