What do you guys use to track your expenses?

Hey BHers,

Just wondering how you guys track your expenses. I've been starting a lot of niche sites, thus outsourcing a lot, and have been trying to track everything in Excel. But my self-made template is pretty shitty.

Any programs or anything out there you recommend that are good for tracking expenses and such?

Depends on what you use to pay for the services.

When it comes to Internet Marketing, I pay everything with Paypal or one of my debit cards. So pretty much I open 2 websites, one is Paypal account, one is my Internet banking for that account the card is associated to, set the filters and have a perfect realtime record of all the expenses anytime I want

I use shoeboxed.com. Its free & you just forward the email receipt, upload a pdf or you can also pay to mail in receipts and have them enter them in. I just use the email forwarding option. Its really simple.

The simpler you keep things, the simpler bookkeeping will be. I pay for all of my IM expenses on one credit card, and have all of my payments funneled to one bank account. No excel spreadsheets or extra programs necessary, couldn't be easier.

Not sure how much business you do but I have an accountant I take my receipts to and then I get a P&L for each department along with a summary.

It is real easy to look at any month throughout the year and see where I am year to date or compare month to month.

I also have a report that compares year to year.

I use to use quick books before the accountant and when I first started I used excel and had a column that was for the category so I could sort by category.

What I didn't like about excel was you really couldn't compare things it was more of a way to just keep track of what I spent.

Quick books was pretty nice because you could run all the reports and see were you stood. What I didn't like about it was I had so many things to document that I ether needed to hire someone and train them or just hire an accountant that could probably teach me a thing or two about loop holes.

So as you can see, I went through a few stages. I really think you need to determine how much interaction you want to have with the actual data entry.

I wish you well in whatever you decide.

When you get busy, QuickBooks is SO much better than a spreadsheet. You can instantly pull up P&L's and reports etc and see what your tax positions is at any time.

There is a small learning curve - especially if you're not familiar with any bookkeeping procedures - but it's easy to use. And you can just send the file with your receipts to your accountant at the end of the year.

Definitely stick to one account and payment card as well if you can, then you can use the statements to help reconcile.

Mint.com.

Have different accounts (biz, personal) and you can add credit cards, paypal, bank accounts...etc. Track everything there. Budget, look at charts....

Sounds good guys. Appreciate all the responses. I'll be deciding over the next few days what to do. I have two debit cards, so I may just start using one specifically for IM expenses and such.

I use my iphone app iXpenseit.

texthog.com could work. Google Docs is another. Depends really on features you want exactly.