I know that I should be switching from Money and making Moneywell my primary finance software, but I’m having a tough time. I can’t seem to ensure that my checkbook balances to the accounts and that procedure is harder for someone who is so tied to online banking, like myself. Let me explain.
I’ve covered before how Moneywell handles running balances and accounts. Something that I haven’t mentioned is that Moneywell has some really good, powerful reconciliation workflows integrated in it. The Reconcile screens are great for someone who is paper based and who reconciles the checkbook with the printed statements at the end of the month. But, that’s not me – those aren’t my habits. And it has to be a system that works with me, else I have to change and the chances of success decrease.
The reconcile functionality appears to be their solution for keeping your checkbook in balance. For that type of system, I’m sure that it works well and the daily balances make much more sense — see, you’ll have a statement balance to match to every month in that style system.
But, what about someone who uses online banking – particularly someone who does it daily and whose reconciliation process occurs almost as often? I guess that I could begin matching the running balance online with the daily balance in Moneywell and marking the transactions as reconciled once they hit the online account and clear. That, I assume, is the same net outcome as reconciling to a paper statement. So, that is what I am resolving today to attempt for the next week. I’m going to try and modify my actions and see if I may be able to adopt a better way of accounting my personal finances.
In the meantime, I have been relying too heavily upon Microsoft Money. I know this and I have paid money for a software which seems to be better long term. I have to keep this in my mind and remind myself daily to do it.
