Geeking!

[hrj]

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.")

Comments

[zoccolaro.livejournal.com]

Wow, and I thought I was A-R with my excel spreadsheet for each month and monetary stream. =) I just track my charges and make sure that they check out with the online statments - any difference in excess of $50 (not worth my time to dig deeper for less) I reconcile.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

*tee*hee* I insist that my statements reconcile to the penny. My cash log is a bit looser -- I don't tend to get upset unless I find myself off by $5 or so. But to a great extent, the major purpose of both the Excel and FileMaker versions is to give me a complex problem to practice my programing skills on. Plus, I'm willing to put in an awful lot of work if it will allow me to be lazy.

[patoadam]

Why don't you want to use Quicken?

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Um ... because this is more fun?

Actually, it's because when I first started developing this system, I really didn't need anything as elaborate as Quicken -- it was just a duplicate of my checkbook register so that I could let Excel to the arithmetic on the balances and reconciliation. Then later I added a table for cash purchases (because I wanted to track what I was spending a little more closely). Then later I added tables for reconciling my credit cards. Then later I added budget categories to simplify my year-end financial review. And along the way I added all sorts of bells and whistles to automate regular tasks or to keep track of new types of information (like which month items appeared on a statement). So the system evolved along with what I was interested in tracking and recording.

But let's just go back to "because this is more fun". I use Excel and FileMaker a lot for both my home research projects and at work (well, not FileMaker at work, but similar programs), so it's useful to have relatively simple projects to practice my skills on in order to learn new features.