Good day!

I am a young man that has recently begun his life "on his own". A few months ago, me and my girlfriend moved in together and are now renting an apartment. The first few months have been a little hectic in regard to finanse, as our spending and payments have varied due to the move. The first couple of months were very unpredictable due to the bills and extra spending that comes with changing household, but it seems to be stabilizing now.

With all that taken into account, we still don't have a clear picture of our financial situation and capabilities, so we have decided to crack down on the problem and do some math on our numbers. Incidentally, when reinstalling her laptop with a new operating system, I accidentally noticed these finance tracking tools, one of which was skrooge, and now that it's relevant, I decided to give it a shot. I've never used any actual finance tracking and graphing software, so this is a complete mistery to me.

What I would like to do is track my personal income and spending, which is my salary. What kind of account should I create for that? This is an income that is regular (monthly) with a slight variation in the date, which may or may not be taken into account (it is rarely of importence). What I would like to do is set that fixed income amount on my "timeline" and just add expenses. Some of the expenses should/could be regular (like rent and utilities, for example), some might not. The utilities for example, can be a composite of various factors, like centralized heating (which is only on during the winter, so it wouldn't apply during summer months). Also, I would like the ability to input various spending, like grocery purchases, at the end of the day.

So, to summerize, I would like to simply track my regular and irregular expenses on a timeline with the ability to create composite regular expenses. Also, it would be very convenient if I could graph these somehow and maybe have an extra "field", or whatever would be the term for it, that would serve as savings or "left over" that would count together every month, which doesn't explicitely need to be a bank account or anything.

Help with this would be highly appreciated. Also, to not bug people about these things in the future, could someone point me to some informational material that would describe dealing with this sort of accounting? That would be most excellent

jgartner wrote:What I would like to do is track my personal income and spending, which is my salary. What kind of account should I create for that? This is an income that is regular (monthly) with a slight variation in the date, which may or may not be taken into account (it is rarely of importence).

What I would do is to create an account for your salary, with a scheduled operation.
Then create another account for you expenses and add scheduled operations as you need, so that the only thing you have to do is to manually register your irregularities, as well as edit such regularities that are not so regular.
And then you can track both the accounts, of type wallet.

If anyone has a better idea is welcome.

jgartner wrote:Good day!
What I would like to do is track my personal income and spending, which is my salary. What kind of account should I create for that? This is an income that is regular (monthly) with a slight variation in the date, which may or may not be taken into account (it is rarely of importence). What I would like to do is set that fixed income amount on my "timeline" and just add expenses. Some of the expenses should/could be regular (like rent and utilities, for example), some might not. The utilities for example, can be a composite of various factors, like centralized heating (which is only on during the winter, so it wouldn't apply during summer months). Also, I would like the ability to input various spending, like grocery purchases, at the end of the day.

When using a finance management program like Skrooge, it's typical to create an "account" (or accounts) that correspond to your real-life finances. So when you get paid, your money then goes into your bank account, or billfold, or bitcoin wallet or mattress or whatever. For most people with a single bank account, you would probably choose a "current" account.

So every pay period, log the deposit (making this a scheduled transaction if desired), schedule debits for fixed things like your rent, and manually enter variable expenses and miscellaneous deposits as they occur. (For planning purposes, I enter estimated values several months in advance for those larger variable expenses you mention like utilities. When the bill comes, I update the transaction with the actual value.) Just being able to see projected balance in the "operations" page over the next few months is a valuable tool.

When you buy groceries or eat out or pay for a bus pass or a tank of gas, record these transactions individually. Select a category for each -- Skrooge comes with a bunch of ready-made categories for you. (Don't be tempted to use too many categories, but also try to keep from lumping too many transactions into "Miscellaneous" either.)

Reconcile this account regularly. For one, it's just good practice so you know you really have what you think you have. More immediately, Skrooge can easily hide your old reconciled transactions so you can focus on the current and future without sifting through everything you've ever bought or paid for.

You might see if your bank offers a booklet or web page for getting started with home accounting. At this basic bookkeeping level, Skrooge works pretty much the same as other finance managers like Quicken, and the concept isn't really any different from a paper journal or checkbook register of yesterday (except it does the math for you). So even if your friends or family don't use Skrooge, they might still be able to help you with the basics. Once you get to Skrooge-specific things, you'll be versed enough in the basics that the Skrooge handbook will help.