psone

Sam over at Milenomics just did a very extensive post about how to keep track of MS and made up a google doc and form to enter data easily and while on the go. If anyone else is seeking something like this give it a look, it helped me:
http://milenomics.com/2014/05/purchase-tracking-tools/

Tuppins

Apologies if this has been mentioned already, but I have a reconciliation that I do periodically as a "sanity check." It should also show if you have a $500 GC floating around that you forgot about. It's basically a spreadsheet that has two columns:
ASSETS: this is everything that hasn't "closed the loop" yet. GC sitting on your bedside table, balances on your BB or other prepaids, PayPal reloads that haven't been loaded yet, etc.
LIABILITIES: The outstanding balances on all your credit cards. Subtract from this number all legitimate spend on those credit cards as well as all the MS "costs" - i.e., the sum of all those $4.95 activation fees.
The NET of these two totals should be $0.

kingrat

Pretty good article.... gives me some good ideas..

cdancer20

Yes I thought the article was good as well. However, I do think that the mileage shouldn't be mandatory. He addresses that in the article but I still don't agree with it. I'm not trying to use up time to figure out how many miles out of my way I went to do these. In my situation, the miles are minimal anyways.

barrytuneup

i have gone from spreadsheet to pen and paper method for keeping track of everything. Spreadsheet was way to busy with all the signup bonuses, GC/OV/ etc. Too many pages. I buy 6-8 OV/GF during the week and about 10-12 on Sat AM at 2 CVS and 1 grocery. In my spare time I arrange the GC and BB/Serve/ GoBank cards and put them in order along with GC for my Sat AM trip to load at WM. Tomorrow I will load 2 BB/1 Serve/and 2500 to Gobank. I then take my remaining 12-15 OV/GC to CS counter and buy MO. This is at 7:00AM when the store is empty. Now I have 8-9 MO for 1K and a load of drained cards. I then deposit 1 1K MO to 2 banks in my area and mail the rest to my bank by mail banks, and keep copies of MO and deposit slips. During the week, I actually spend spare time at work calling the 800# for the drained cards to make sure I drained them all. But I actually have 30 cards to check without tomorrow's cards. But this works for me. I mail the deposits on Sat PM at local PO and check online by Wed PM to make sure deposits made it. Works for me. Same thing every week. Mind you, I start out on Sat at 6:45Am (7 hours from now)and by 9:30 I'm back home with just about 10 minutes of home bookkeeping. BTW, had a power failure last month at home that wiped out all my spreadsheet info. My flash drive was in machine and has no data on it. I do throw all the CVS receipts and used GC in a box in my basement, why I don't know!!

mintcilantro

Anybody have experience with a receipt tracking app?

I need to move teh whole process to smartphone b/c the extra delay in logging info is not desirable. Besides one can get the bookkeeping done while standing in line at various stores or banks. I carry sharpie, envelope and sticky notes to make sure everything is labeled.

I really like Accounts for iPhone as it is a mini excel but it doesn't allow me to take photos. It would be neat to capture a photo of the receipt and the prepaid card after it is emptied out.
http://grahamhaley.co.uk/accounts/

MasterCharge

op i think excel is the best way to go because you can compare it with bank statements and transactions.

skibum7732

Pen and paper...no way I could reconcile what I do with that method. Excel works wonders and you can make it less 'busy.' However, I do have 8 seperate pages in my excel doc but find it very user friendly and makes keeping track of everythinga breeze.
Calling to check gc balance...No way, my receipt shows exactly what was taken off each card. Huge waste of time if you are organized

xp0

At the start of the new year I said I was going to be better about this whole thing and started this giant excel spreadsheet that was keeping track of everything. Purchases, points, BPs, etc .... Then it got to be so much work I stopped using it and just kept MSing.

Worst case I lose a few $500 GCs but who really cares since its almost like free money. I could 'lose' a lot a month before noticing so if that happens, I just chalk it up as the cost of doing business.

ZzzzX

It's easy to try to write things off but I want to avoid that. I use a combination of Mint and pen and paper. Mostly because writing things down by hand forces me to memorize steps and I find it easier to see and scan all financial actions. But I'm not running 18 cards at once, either.

Tuppins

So which of you programmer types is going to design the iMS app?
I'd pay good money for that - probably even $10, if it was well designed and did everything I wanted it to.
Seems like we all use a combo of things, and an app that integrated a calendar, balance checker, receipt tracker (with picture capabilities), etc., would be a big hit around here...

MsArbi

Deleted.

cdancer20

I use a combo of Mint and Excel sheets. I keep track of all MS activity under 1 category that I don't use anyways. And in my excel, I keep track of how much GC I purchased, fees, cashback expected, and when cashback was received. I try to make sure now that they match $100 on amount in/out and realized for the first time that I was missing $100 in GC purchase. Realized that it was in the mess of my car with all the other opened gift card packages. Just laying there. So happy for this!

I thought about making a personal program (webbased) that would keep track of it but that's too much work lol.

mintcilantro

I agree.. so far I've been doing a combo of excel and iOS accounts app.

excel is very flexible but it doesn't work so well on smart phones and the fool proof way of keeping track of GCs/cards used is to enter info as soon as you exit the store.

cdancer20

I agree that excel isn't that great for cell phones. I keep mine password protected even in my cloud area (since such sensitive info) and Office Mobile on Android doesn't support passwords. (F#*$#*&*). I even took the password off and the mobile app just sucks. The other apps I have seem to mess up things when I save so I just use mobile only for checking information on the go. I started to move to Google Docs but I'm so comfortable with Excel that I don't want to change things up.