Balanced Again

A few years ago I used Quicken for balancing the check book. With all the hassles of using MicroSoft and licensed software that could not be easily moved I started using linux. I found a finance package in linux that I tried, that worked very much like Quicken. I had some minor difficulties. Finally I decided to just format a spreadsheet to do the register calculations in a serial fashion. We have been using the same spreadsheet now for at least 4 years. At the beginning of each year I will truncate the top of the sheet by fixing the values of the cells at the very top down to the last cleared item. Then we begin the new year.

Sometimes we wait a bit long to enter the checks into the spreadsheet and do the reconciliation. We have waited as long as six months at times. When we reconcile the bank statements with the spreadsheet sometimes it is very stressful for either or both of us. Jeanette is our homemaker. She keeps the bills paid, purchases the groceries, writes the checks, pays the tithing, and most of the general financial things in our home. Everybody makes mistakes, the only questions are how many and how severe.

Just a few entries into the reconciliation and we were off by $0.17. That same error carried for several check registers. Then the error changed to $0.02. When the last statement was being reconciled we were off by $348.74. There was an electronic transfer that we had not cleared. We never did find the difference between our records and the bank for a few cents. We decided it was easier to just adjust the last register entry. Now we are good for another reconciliation a month or more down the road. I am glad that is over.