- Joined
- May 14, 2019
Pardon me if a thread like this already exists.
Mine: a giant nine-workbook Excel file that I keep track of all my finances in. Every item I purchase goes into a ledger with details like the location, type of purchase, date, price, and so on. Another spreadsheet combines all of that information and tallies up the expenses for each individual day. Another spreadsheet computes average expenditures, as well as shares of expenditures, for each of 12 different major categories and 37 subcategories. By changing settings (with only a few button presses), I can rig it to only count the expenses incurred over any time period, whether I define it as:
- X days before today
- X days before Date Y
- X days since Date Y
- Average from today to Date Y
- Average between Dates Y and Date Z
Then, there's another spreadsheet that just the food information gets fed into to keep track of my cost of eating, day-per-day, based on usage of goods instead of acquisition (charges for taking something out of inventory, instead of putting it in). And another for tracking miles, predicting gasoline expenditures (and thus pricing) off of that, and so getting daily gas expenditures. And a separate sheet for common routes I travel, which uses the gas/gas price estimates to predict costs of trips in terms of gasoline, so that if I go to a city I can think of it in terms as a cost to be incurred (like a train ticket).
I've been continuously building up data for going on three months now: not a single purchase over that period hasn't been recorded in my ledger. 100 straight days of perfect record-keeping.
Mine: a giant nine-workbook Excel file that I keep track of all my finances in. Every item I purchase goes into a ledger with details like the location, type of purchase, date, price, and so on. Another spreadsheet combines all of that information and tallies up the expenses for each individual day. Another spreadsheet computes average expenditures, as well as shares of expenditures, for each of 12 different major categories and 37 subcategories. By changing settings (with only a few button presses), I can rig it to only count the expenses incurred over any time period, whether I define it as:
- X days before today
- X days before Date Y
- X days since Date Y
- Average from today to Date Y
- Average between Dates Y and Date Z
Then, there's another spreadsheet that just the food information gets fed into to keep track of my cost of eating, day-per-day, based on usage of goods instead of acquisition (charges for taking something out of inventory, instead of putting it in). And another for tracking miles, predicting gasoline expenditures (and thus pricing) off of that, and so getting daily gas expenditures. And a separate sheet for common routes I travel, which uses the gas/gas price estimates to predict costs of trips in terms of gasoline, so that if I go to a city I can think of it in terms as a cost to be incurred (like a train ticket).
I've been continuously building up data for going on three months now: not a single purchase over that period hasn't been recorded in my ledger. 100 straight days of perfect record-keeping.
