Microsoft Money: Tracking Your Finances

Being an accountant, I am very particular when it comes to my personal finances. One program I like is Microsoft Money – I use it to record all my bank, investment and other financial transactions. In this post, I’ll describe how I use Money and give a list of tips for using financial software for home use.


Basically, I enter everything with Microsoft Money! As soon as I take money out of the bank or pay a bill, it gets entered in the appropriate bank account. Each time my investment statements come, I enter all my investment purchases with the correct purchase price and number of shares.


Once everything is entered, there are many useful reports available to see how my spending was in a given month or to see how well (or badly) my investments are doing. One particular report I run, is a snapshot for the month. It tells me my top five spending areas as well as other warnings and valuable information.


Here are a few tips to get the most out of your personal financial software:

Don’t use too many spending categories
When I first started, I had a category for everything but it got tedious fairly quickly and I found that I stopped keeping things current. I use less than 10 categories: my main category is ‘Food/Ent’ – I enter all bank withdrawals, dining out, partying and grocery store trips into this category.

Use cash as little as possible
It’s easier to keep track of expenses when they’re itemized on a credit card statement which you can then enter into your software. I rarely use cash – I actually don’t even really bother keeping track of cash receipts because it’s such a pain and takes too much time.

Enter transactions before they happen
This is a great way to track your cash flow or see if you’ll have enough in the bank to cover bills coming up. I enter things like rent, large payments at least a few weeks ahead of time so that I’ll know what my cash balance will be.

Download transactions from your bank website
This can save a lot of time rather than entering in transactions yourself. In Money, this feature is still free, and I’ve been using the software for 3 years. Other software will give you a free period and then may charge after that.

Reconcile your bank account often
Once you’ve downloaded transactions, you can see what has cleared and what is still outstanding. This way, you won’t get that nasty call from the bank that something has bounced

Run reports regularly
The numbers don’t lie – it will pinpoint fairly quickly where you need to make some changes in your spending habits.


I actually started out using Quicken, which is also a great piece of software. It actually is a little more robust in features than Money, but I found it starting to get too expensive, so I switched to Money which is easily half the price. Plus, I found I didn’t use all the extra features that were available.


I’ve been using financial software to keep track of my finances since 1996. If you have many transactions going through your account like I do, you’ll need a quick and convenient way to keep track of them. I can’t imagine ever going back to using only paper records because of the instant information and useful reports available.

Related posts:
Tracking Your Finances
Overspending: What to do About It
Gain Control Over Your Finances
Controlling Your Spending