I’m very finicky when it comes to managing my personal finances. I like to make sure all bills are paid on time, and I know where all of my money is and how much I have. This is going to be one of my more informative posts, so make sure to give it a read AND take action if you are trying to better manage your own financial situation.

Enter Microsoft Money. The software that keeps it all in check for me. For $30-$100 you will have the perfect solution for managing your finances. I’ve been using MS Money to track my finances since about 2000, which is great because I have a lot of historical data that I can pull from.

My first process is that I’ll normally keep any receipt that I get and put it in my wallet. I try and use my credit card for most purchases since I get 1.5-5% cash back rewards. After a week or two when my wallet has a decent amount of receipts, I’ll empty it out on my desk and start inputting them into MS Money. For any items which may be a write-off on taxes, I add “write off activetuning” or whatever business of mine it may apply to in the memo field. This just makes it easier for me at the end of the year when I’m giving all my information to my accountant.

At the end of each month when I get my statement for each account, I’ll go in and balance the account. This will ensure that I have all charges in the software, and of course it will ensure I don’t find any mistakes on the statement (I’ve found double charges, incorrect tips, etc before, so it’s always good to go line-by-line). I do this for each account, every month (savings, checking, credit cards, etc…you can even do your PayPal account). Each account doesn’t take very long to do, especially if you actively input your receipts through the month.

The best method I’ve found to do this is to go through the statement, and highlight the amount in each line once it has been cleared in MS Money. This way once you go through everything, you can just back to the stuff that hasn’t been highlighted and make sure they either need to be put in, or are mistakes. The most important reason for doing this is making sure that you never fall behind, and all of your numbers are accurate at least up to that month.

Alternatively, you can have MS Money connect to your financial institution and just download everything from the statement and put it into the software. I don’t like this method for a few reasons:

1. I don’t like the names of the items that are chosen.
2. They don’t choose the right categories that I want
3. I want to add memos many times
4. It’s hard to remember what they are for
5. You get lazy and don’t proactively update your own financials, therefore you lose touch with it.

Once you have data in there, it’s easy to just pull up the “accounts list” page and easily see where everything stands. On top of my regular accounts, I also track my investment accounts through MS Money. Investment accounts also show up in your accounts list, so you can easily track your net worth.

Another cool thing I use MS Money for is to track categories and run custom reports. When I set everything up for the first time, I went through every category that MS puts in by default. I added/deleted/modified everything as needed so I could have things specifically tailored to what I want. So now if I want to see how much my gas expenses have been over the past few years, I can see that I’m spending a lot more money than before (due to more driving and higher gas prices):

You can of course export the data to something like Excel if you want to create better charts.

The other thing I use MS Money for is to manage any sort of recurring deposits/bills. For example I know every month I’m going to have certain bills and a paycheck from various sources. I set these transactions up to either be automatic (for example I take a specific percentage out of every paycheck and put it into my ING savings account) or manually (ex: My electric bill varies from month to month). This gives me an idea of generally what I’m planning to spend/deposit, and I can better manage my finances knowing this information.

You can also use this to create a budget. Based on what you normally spend/make every month, you can budget a certain amount to specific categories, and MS Money will help you track this. For example if you only want to spend $200/month going out for food, you may find out mid-month you’ve used the amount you’ve allotted and you can tone it down for the rest of the month in order to maintain your budget. This is perfect for those of you that have a hard time realizing how much you are spending, and don’t want to end up with a massive credit card bill you weren’t expecting.

There’s much more, but this is pretty much what I use it for. Using my basic guidelines, you too can proactively manage your own finances and make sure you are in control.

Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe brings all of your personal accounts – banking, credit, and investment – into one place and provides the tools you need to help you improve your credit and debt and tackle tax time with ease, so you can spend less time worrying about your money and more time enjoying it. Money 2007 Deluxe automatically consolidates your online accounts in one place.