As I mentioned in a post at the beginning of the year, I'm growing weary of detailing receipts in Quicken. I've got to find a way to streamline the process. I do download the transactions from my bank account, but then I always go back with the receipts in hand and sort everything into categories.
One of the ways I think I can cut down the work is instead of separating groceries from other grocery store bought items (like household items, for example), to just lump everything together.
Although I really like seeing how much money was spent on meat or vegetables, or what I consider “junk” food, who really cares? Only me. That was my first step, to lump all FOOD together, as groceries.
If I lump everything together from the the grocery store, or Walmart, Target, drugstores, etc., that's going to change my budget for that area.
Ironically, as I'm feeling better physically, I'm beginning to do more around my house, finally I'm able to do some decluttering and actually caring how my home looks. There is so much to be done, and if I can automate the process of our finances for a while it would be nice to not have to have that hanging over my head and feeling guilty about all the receipts stacked up waiting for me to touch them and file them.
I'll tell you more once I know what I'll be doing.
Yours Truly,
You’re as OCD as I am, eh? I’m still breaking out the groceries from Target & Costco runs, which you can easily do in Quicken. But it is time-consuming, and the new taxes make it even more so.
I used to lump everything that I purchased in a supermarket or big box store into a “groceries” category. But after a while that really wasn’t satisfactory…I wanted to know what I was spending on food and what on other junk. Because I didn’t use Quicken for budgeting–instead the budget resided in Excel–the budget had slightly categories: for Costco, Target, Grocery Stores, and the like. That is, I budgeted by where I would spent, not so much on what I would spend money on.
I only broke out expenditures on types of merchandise in Quicken; right-clicking on a category to generate an instant report made it easy to see what was being spent on, say, “food” or “household items” over a given period.
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