A while ago, I decided to leave Mint due to a few reasons (which I don't particularly want to debate), such as:
(1) Banks/Credit Cards routinely disconnecting (whether that is bank's fault or Mint's is irrelevant).
(2) Accuracy of auto-categorizing, and speed of manually categorizing (having to scroll down through a menu of un-deletable categorizes) etc...
(3) Recurrence of duplicates from bank accounts
(4) Security related to having my bank/account information on a third-party site, regardless of how secure it is.
I figured since Mint was getting disconnected from my accounts, I would need to reconnect them each time, in which case, I might as well just download my transaction history since last time. In addition, I wanted the ability to make "rules" that basically says that any time it sees the word "Amazon", it should categorize it as shopping, etc...
To that end, I made an Excel template that essentially performs these functions. You start by copying and pasting your transactions into a separate worksheet for each account. Excel will then auto-categorize each purchase based on it's description based on "rules" you set in another worksheet. It will then compile them together using a "query" and place them in a master "ledger" worksheet, which is then used as the input to pivot tables to display the data. The last sheet is the budget sheet where you can specify a budget in different categories, and it will automatically determine your average spending in that category, and the difference between your average spending in that category and your budgeted amount.
Since queries and pivot tables do not auto-update, I have written a pretty simple three-line macro to do this.
Please let me know your thoughts, and whether you have any recommendations for improvements or added functionality. Or if you want to discuss the code I used to auto-detect categories, etc...
Because of Reddit policy, unfortunately, I cannot post the template here. If you have any other option to share the excel sheet, please let me know as well.
TIA
Submitted November 22, 2020 at 10:50PM by arkie87 https://ift.tt/338nv1m
