Tracking expenditures
 

I am brand spanking new to this 'lifestyle' of financing my vacations using credit card rewards. So excited but overwhelmed! Thanks for your patience, time, and help. I am a nervous wreck paying most of my bills using 3-4 different credit cards and having no way of tracking/graphing my expenditures in order to manage my spending in different categories. What's a newbie to do???

Tracking expenditures
 

Mint.com will easily keep track of and graph all that fun stuff for you automatically when you input your account data. For on the go, I like the simplicity of the SpendingLite app for quick inputs of my outgoing spends :)

Call me old fashioned, but I still use Excel.

I've never used Excel, but I have used mint.com. Thanks so much for the information.

morgaab welcome to FT.

I'm going to move this over to the forum for all things points and miles, Milesbuzz! where it is a bit more on-topic than here. Good question though!

Jenbel
Co-moderator, Communitybuzz!

I've also been using Mint, but I find that it's a bit slow in sending out updates/alerts. I've signed up for PageOnce and it's done the trick, but it doesn't seem to have as many banks/CCs as Mint

I'm looking for a site that will place every expenditure into a category. I need to know how much I'm spending on gas, eating out, education, etc. I thought pageonce only showed awards.

This is going to upset some people using a certain four letter word around here but I'm going to say it...

For fixed expenses where I've already negotiated the price and it's going to happen no matter what, I use a credit card.

For variable expenses I'm trying to closely budget, I use CASH. Only way to keep myself reliably under control.

I consider the loss of miles on those purchases a penalty for my low willpower.

I use Quicken to track my 20+ credit cards and all my various bank accounts and retirement accounts. I download transactions daily to keep up to date. It's easy to assign categories and run reports.

On a similar note, how do you guys in consulting manage this where you can use your own CC for expenses? Any ideas would be helpful

??? I charge everything where ever it has the most payback then submit my expenses each month?

Maybe it's me, but I find the auto-update of quicken to be inconsistent in-working and delayed (probably due to the data in the feeds from the various banks not being there).

I use Quicken and track the sort of quantity like you do, but I find myself manually entering the transactions.

I meant between your personal and business expense when the categories match. Lets say Chase Sapphire for restaurants. That can be for noth personal and business or Amex for personal and business flight expense.

Oh! I break them out manually but others probably have more clever methods.

It's not a major burden for me since my categories for personal tend to be different from business, and thus appear on different cards.

I have to tweak the setting every few months. Usually de-activating download for a particular financial institution and reactivating it does the trick. I use Quicken for my business also and download approximately 1000 transaction a month. I would be lost without it. Downloading also alerts me to fraudulent charges almost immediately (compared to waiting for statements).