Record-keeping
Nov. 25th, 2005 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowI'm a little bit obsessive about keeping good personal financial records. (Only a little, as shall be seen; laziness can trump it, sometimes.) The problem is, the kinds of details I want aren't available (as far as I can tell) in the commercially available financial packages, and on the other hand those packages usually contain a lot of details I have no interest in tracking. So, I've been using makeshifts of my own construction, lately based on Access.
The set of tables I'd been using until a month or two ago was more-or-less satisfactory, but I never got around to constructing forms that would make data entry easy; I had to pull up numerous tables every time I wanted to enter a transaction, and it got to be a real nuisance. Finally, I got tired of it and quit keeping records.
Obviously, this was a bad thing.
I've taken advantage of this week's break to reconstruct the system. In particular, I've eliminated one bit of foolishness; I was trying to keep items like "1 bag of dog treats, $x.xx" in the same table with "$40 withdrawn from checking account", even though the latter needed to be treated differently (since running balances are important for the one, but not the other). Also, this time, I've built up a decent set of forms, so that I can create a transaction (Shop'n'Save, Nov. 25, 2005, $xx.xx) and immediately itemize it, with running totals kept for error-checking and each item assigned to its appropriate account (meat, pet food, sales tax...).
I just ran through entering several transactions, and it works like a charm. There are still some bugs in it - in particular, I'd like to be able to create new accounts on the fly, instead of having to close the transaction form, open the accounts form, create the account, and then re-open the transaction form - but it's much better than what I had. I'm rather pleased with myself.
The set of tables I'd been using until a month or two ago was more-or-less satisfactory, but I never got around to constructing forms that would make data entry easy; I had to pull up numerous tables every time I wanted to enter a transaction, and it got to be a real nuisance. Finally, I got tired of it and quit keeping records.
Obviously, this was a bad thing.
I've taken advantage of this week's break to reconstruct the system. In particular, I've eliminated one bit of foolishness; I was trying to keep items like "1 bag of dog treats, $x.xx" in the same table with "$40 withdrawn from checking account", even though the latter needed to be treated differently (since running balances are important for the one, but not the other). Also, this time, I've built up a decent set of forms, so that I can create a transaction (Shop'n'Save, Nov. 25, 2005, $xx.xx) and immediately itemize it, with running totals kept for error-checking and each item assigned to its appropriate account (meat, pet food, sales tax...).
I just ran through entering several transactions, and it works like a charm. There are still some bugs in it - in particular, I'd like to be able to create new accounts on the fly, instead of having to close the transaction form, open the accounts form, create the account, and then re-open the transaction form - but it's much better than what I had. I'm rather pleased with myself.
