time = money

All [four? :-P] of my loyal readers may have noticed that my post frequency has dropped quite a bit recently. I was on vacation, or recovering from it, for a while and work has been somewhat busy. For the last couple weekends, one thing has been sucking my time down more than anything else; the last 12 months of my financial history.

Since September 2004, I've used spreadsheets to track my income and spending. Every transaction was categorized by date, payment method, two levels of descriptive categories, and [of course] dollar value. I had sums that ran over time and over types of spending, and it was a pretty decent system. Not decent enough, though. My OCD would not be satisfied without a true accounting program, and I found a good one, GnuCash, that met all my needs.

I read the documentation and experimented a bit, finally deciding that I'd switch from spreadsheets to GnuCash from December 2005, forward. Unfortunately, I also made the decision to port my data for all of 2005 to GnuCash, as well. About 12 hours later, I'm finally finished. It was worth every minute. For a taste of teh awesomeness, see the graphic below. This is one of the [customizable] reports you can run, albeit a pretty frivolous one; it shows all spending broken down by day of the week, in this case summed over CY2005.