We’ve been playing around with budgeting and tracking spending.  I actually have a box of receipts on my desk from the last month or so that I had planned to go through and categorize in Google Docs or an Open Office spreadsheet.  It’s daunting looking at this big box of random slips of paper.  I have no idea how people track spending.  I carried a check register in my wallet for awhile and tried to record each transaction as it occurred.   Not very successful.

Now I’m trying GnuCash.  Brandi had some experience with Microsoft Money and it seemed ridiculously overcomplicated for our needs.  I also don’t use Windows so it wasn’t really an option and GnuCash is free.  I downloaded transaction from American Express and imported them easily, but my credit union, North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union, only offers CSV downloads.  GnuCash doesn’t recognize CSV.  So, I wrote a python parser to convert the CSV file to QIF, which GnuCash does understand.  Here’s a link to secu2qif.

We’ll see if we get anywhere.  While I was parsing I did notice that both the state and federal revenue services have issued  us refunds, which was a nice surprise.  They were both quite quick, I think.   Boy, that mortgage interest deduction was a nice benefit.

Tags: finance, open-source, software

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Family, Free Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.