How does it know your Income and Expenses?

If you don’t have them already, download your transactions from your bank. You need: Date, Details and Amount.

Avoid using cash if you can. Otherwise, add any cash expenses to the list.

Do whatever categorizing you want, to split them up. If you are using GnuCash feel free to use “from” and “to”, it understands that. If you just use a single category for each transaction, that’s fine too.

Copy, Paste, CalcMonthlySpend.

It remembers your categories. It knows what you mean.

It sorts through them, totals them, and gives you the big picture and why.

It does it the same way every time. It is consistent. You can SEE if things are getting better or worse (or if you’re in trouble) and KNOW that the trend is not just a quirk of how the books were done this time.

But Figuring Out Transaction Categories Takes Time

Yep, that’s true. That’s why we use a categorizing tool. You can’t have a copy yet, but I will include it in EziCashflow and send it out to everyone that bought a copy before then.

It’s a really useful gadget that dramatically reduces the time on this part too.

Transactions are “all the same”. That’s why we put them in categories. The usual way is by looking through them all – manually. But how do you categorize? What are you looking for? How do you decide? I’m betting that: it is a process, there are patterns, every time it says “Fee” it goes in the “Bank Fees” category, or if it says “PayPal” and is a positive amount that’s “Income – online sales”.

It’s not prettied up yet but it does exist and works like a treat. It doesn’t deal with the one-offs that happen; but it does over 90% of the work for us. That saves a lot of time too and, something we really like, puts the workload back on the computer instead of us.

Keep an eye out for it, or send us badgering emails to see it sooner.

How do I get it?

Visit the product page.