[moneydance] Your Moneydance Process?

[Edward Reid]

At 6/7/2009 03:17 PM -0700, Michelle wrote:
>In Moneydance I setup online banking with the Bank and Credit companies.

Note that online banking within MD (or any other bookkeeping program) 
has the potential to confuse you if you aren't already clear on what 
you're doing with the accounts and the program. The 
transaction-download part of online banking is just a shortcut to 
enter transactions that you could have put in by hand. Opinions 
differ as the whether this is a good idea; in particular, it 
short-circuits part of the reconciliation, but OTOH the bank probably 
keeps more accurate records than you can. We'll never all agree; it's 
a difference in personalities and financial situations.

>So what I do is download all my transaction from my bank, which are
>basically only 2 things: electronic deposits from my job and payments to my
>credit card, i.e. "CITIBANK CREDIT CARD Bill Payment". This goes under
>'Checking' account.

OK.

>Then I download all my transactions from Citi Credit and
>delete the transactions that say something like "electronic payment
>received" (because those are already in the 'Checking'),

Just make sure that the transaction from the bank in fact linked with 
the credit card account. When a payment from the bank to the cc is 
entered (whether by hand or by download), it should show up in both 
accounts. If you're saying that you get a duplicate payment as a 
result of the download, then you're right to delete the dupe.

>When I do online bill payment, I look at my credit transactions and make
>online payment for each transaction: like $20, $45, $32.

Not quite sure what you're saying you're doing here.

>I don't know if this is how you are suppose to use "Reconcile" feature, but
>what I do in the Reconcile window is look at the "payments" and "deposits"
>boxes and match up the $20, $45, $32.

To reconcile, you should be matching amounts in your MD account with 
the statement from the bank or cc. This is where the downloading can 
confuse you, because you are using the download both to enter and 
reconcile transactions. It may possibly be better to skip the 
download step and enter transactions manually until you are clear on 
the process. This however is a very individual thing.

>I totally ignore the "beginning
>balance" "current balance" "target balance" stuff,

The "difference" is the one you mostly want to pay attention to. When 
it goes to zero, you have reconciled the account (except in unusual 
cases of two or more missing transactions which add up to zero). I 
seldom or never look at the others.

>because I have no idea
>how that works and the numbers are always negative?

As Kevin said, balances are usually positive in bank accounts and 
negative in credit card accounts, because with a bank account it's 
your money in the bank's hands (and thus they owe you money), whereas 
with a cc account you owe them money.

>Though, so far so good. the ending balance for my Checking and Credit match
>in Moneydance with my banks.

Then you're doing something right!

>But their are other features in Moneydance
>(probably I don't know about).

No one will ever use every feature -- the feature set is designed to 
handle the needs of many different users. You have two accounts and 
are reconciling them; that's a good start. That may well be all you 
need for now. Soon enough you'll run into a real life situation that 
you want to handle, and at that point you can investigate how to 
handle it in MD. Life does tend to get more complicated the longer you live.

If you're interested in tracking how you spend your money, then you 
can assign categories to purchases, and get reports later. MD has 
budget features -- I haven't used them but others here do. You can 
track tax-related transaction if that's meaningful to you. You can 
track investments and loans. But there's little point in trying to 
learn how MD handles these situations until you need to, unless 
you're just interested in the process (and in that case, a book on 
bookkeeping is probably a better place to start).

>it'd be nice if anyone posted a link to a screenshot of their Moneydance
>(i'm a visual person).

You're welcome to take a look at http://paleo.org/mdpg.png. Of course 
I've redacted all the numbers and identifying information, but it 
should give you an idea of what yours might look like in 30 years. 
;-) Of course, 30 years ago, no one could have predicted that my 
financial summary would look like this! Mine represents the cruft of 
60 years of life; it's complicated by the existence of three small 
(mostly very small) businesses, but rather few investments. (Despite 
the heavy redaction, I'll probably take this down in a few days.)

Edward
-- 
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org