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).

Mint.com has "edit transaction" and you mark "reimbursable".
Or, I use separate cards.

Whilst I haven't done it yet, I think for 2013 I am going to Excel business expenses as they happen on a per meeting basis - using whatever cards are most appropriate and popping in the details such as:

Travel Cost
M&IE
Person Met/Reason for meeting
Credit cards used
Etc

Have one 'form' per meeting then a totals column that links to annual totals - for self employed filing at year end.

I used to use just Biz cards for this but now I think its better to use the best card per bonus so this is better (plus I keep some cards that are doubles such as SPG Biz pure biz so easy to find those transactions).

I keep a note in my phone, and when i make an expense i note the amount, date, card, what it was for. I use that note as a guide to make sure that i get everything that didnt go on the corp card into my expense report.

It's pretty basic but seems to work. Would love to find an app that would help me track the status of each transaction (as there may be a delay before i have an accounting code for some transactions so not all incurred expenses will be submitted at the same time)

I've found it hard to keep track of unless i write down each transaction at the time since I'll use the same card for business/personal use and the same vendors for both as well (e.g. uber).

I'm new the world of CC bouns and points, however, in 2013, I plan on using one CC a month for allof my business travels expensse, so if I use Card A, everything will ONLY be for work, this way I'll be able to meet all of the min spends and have more, I may not be "maximizing" my points this way but it is a simple way of keeping track of the spends. I'll be averaging 10K a month on cards for work only, this will include, travel, cars, hotels, food and whatever else I needed. Now granted, in Feb, I'll be using the BA card and will be using it for two months to get the total spend on it.

I use Mint extensively to track and monitor expenses. With Mint, it has the ability to learn from past categorization too. There are a few other sites that work well, but I haven't used them personally - Pageonce is another one that comes to mind. Of course, Yodlee is the pioneer in this space. They still power most bank's money management systems.

Do people find mint.com to have accurate/useful categorizations? I used to use mint about 3-4 years ago but the categories were so consistently wrong that it was taking me forever to recategorize everything. That was back in the days of one credit card (quelle horreur!) so I would just look at the statement each month. I still manually look at statements but would love to use mint.com if they've improved their algorithms...

algorithms have definitely been improved, but it's not perfect by any means. I believe the system learns from your manual re-categorizations, but I don't think it's perfect.

Mint has gotten a lot better over the past few years.

I use Excel and Mint.com. Once or twice a week I download transactions from my online accounts (Chase and AMEX) to the excel sheet. I type in my checking account balance then subtract my credit card balance and any bills I need to pay. If I have any reimbursable expenses for work I separate these out. This way I can make sure I'm not spending more than I have and can pay off the cards in full every month :) In the excel sheet I also track the date I applied for cards, the bonus categories, and annual fee amount.

I use Mint.com to see how much I'm spending in each category and try to stay on budget.

I use MoneyWell, which is a Mac desktop application that does budgeting, automatic transaction downloads, and so forth (similar to Quicken, Mint, etc.).

The biggest pain is tracking spending on gift cards and prepaid cards, since those don't easily integrate with such tools. I've got various workarounds that are sort of okay, but not terribly convenient.