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I am having the most insane amount of fun converting my previous all-encompassing financial tracking system (in Excel) into a new all-encompassing financial tracking system (in FileMaker). Yes, I'm having fun re-inventing Quicken from scratch (except that it's designed specifically to do exactly and only what I want it to do).
There wasn't anything particularly wrong with the Excel version, but I wanted to automate a few more processes, and I wanted to remove some redundancies (like, when I enter the mastercard payment, I didn't want to enter it both where it came out of the checking account and where it went into the mastercard account, or when I get cash from an ATM, I didn't want to make separate entries in the checking register and the cash tracker). And rather than having separate Excel tables for each financial "system" that I'm tracking, I wanted a completely integrated record. I wanted a more elegant, push-button way for doing the statement reconciliation. I had a number of very long drop-down menus for my various budget-tracking categories and I wanted to set up a more dynamic interface where initial selections would narrow down the next set of options.
I've done a couple of tear-down-and-start-again rounds in the last day, but I now have the basic framework set up and it's just a matter of tweaking some of the interfaces and setting up the budget-goal reporting screen. So far, the hardest part has been explaining to co-workers just what I was working on over my lunch break. (Quote: "I just look over my bank statement to see if anything looks funny, otherwise I don't worry about it.")
There wasn't anything particularly wrong with the Excel version, but I wanted to automate a few more processes, and I wanted to remove some redundancies (like, when I enter the mastercard payment, I didn't want to enter it both where it came out of the checking account and where it went into the mastercard account, or when I get cash from an ATM, I didn't want to make separate entries in the checking register and the cash tracker). And rather than having separate Excel tables for each financial "system" that I'm tracking, I wanted a completely integrated record. I wanted a more elegant, push-button way for doing the statement reconciliation. I had a number of very long drop-down menus for my various budget-tracking categories and I wanted to set up a more dynamic interface where initial selections would narrow down the next set of options.
I've done a couple of tear-down-and-start-again rounds in the last day, but I now have the basic framework set up and it's just a matter of tweaking some of the interfaces and setting up the budget-goal reporting screen. So far, the hardest part has been explaining to co-workers just what I was working on over my lunch break. (Quote: "I just look over my bank statement to see if anything looks funny, otherwise I don't worry about it.")
