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Banking

Excel vs. Quicken

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So…how’s the bookkeeping working, after a year of using Excel instead of Quicken for Mac?

Last January I switched to Excel for tracking my bank accounts, budget, and credit card charges. After years as a Quicken customer, I’d really lost patience: data vanished in the transfer from Windows to Mac, Quicken for Mac was clunky, and I’d long ago had it with having to upgrade to a pricey  new version every time I turned around. It appears I’m not alone in those sentiments.

Excel has its advantages and its disadvantages vis à vis Quicken. Biggest negative: it can’t talk to your bank or your investment house. Quicken lets you upload and download transactions and data from those august institutions. Nor does Excel care to converse with TurboTax, Intuit’s tax preparation software. Excel talks to you and only to you (or so we hope).

If you want to integrate your bookkeeping with your banking and investing, however, there are alternatives, some of them out there in the Cloud. Programs such as Mint.com (which, alas, was purchased by Intuit), Buxfer, MoneyStrands, Pear Budget, or Thrive sometimes do that sort of thing, and of course Mint will now interact with TurboTax. Not having tried one of these programs, I hesitate to state that any are better, worse, or the same as Quicken. But there they are: something to try if your patience with Intuit wears thin.

Excel has one helluva learning curve, especially for those of us with English-major math skills. After a year of working with it, I’d say my skills are no better than they were at the outset. A year of manipulating Quicken left me with a black belt in Advanced Quickening. However, a rudimentary understanding of Excel’s functions allowed me to build checking and savings accounts and to massage the data into something that I think will be intelligible for my tax accountant.

It’s useful to know that Microsoft now offers a variety of home and office financial  management templates, designed to work with Excel. But it’s pretty easy to build your own.

To build the new Excel workbook, I tried to ape the accounts and functions of Quicken. This entailed creating spreadsheets for each bank account, laid out in identical patterns, plus another spreadsheet for credit-card charges. The latter allowed me to reset the balance each month to the amount budgeted for discretionary spending (which is all that goes on my credit cards), so that the bottom line showed how much was left in any given month’s allowance.

Typical headers for bank account
Tracking credit-card spending against an $800 budget

Come the first of this year, I created what I hope is an intelligible spreadsheet for the accountant by merging data from the credit-card spreadsheet with the bank-account spreadsheet entries and then sorting all the data by category. This made it possible to summarize tax-related data while also making all the year’s transactions, organized by budget category, easily visible and transparent to her.

A number of revelations ensued as I tried to organize this material for the tax accountant. One is that it makes sense to number tax-related categories (1, 2, 3…), so a “sort” command will bring them up at the top of the “sorted” spreadsheet. For example,

1 Medical
2 Mortgage interest
3 Trade group dues

…And the like. When “sorting” data, Excel wants to put numbered items before alphabetical items; so, if you preface each tax-related category with a numeral, the “sort” function will gather all the tax-relevant categories together.

Yeah, I know there’s something called a “pivot report,” and yes, I do suspect it could solve all my problems. However, only a Druid could comprehend the instructions in Excel’s Help file. I gave up after several efforts at trying to call upon those spirits.

In addition to its impenetrability, Excel has the annoying quirk that the (very simple!) formula you enter to create a running balance sometimes comes unstuck for no discernible reason, giving you an incorrect balance. Occasionally I haven’t discovered this until I’ve tried to reconcile my books with the bank’s. Figuring out the problem can be really difficult, because it often results not from incorrect data entry but from some mysterious disjunct between what you’ve asked the program to do and what it decides, midway through the process, to suddenly start doing. When gut instinct tells you something like this is happening, the solution is to go up to a row where the formula is visibly working and then drag the “balance” cell’s qualities all the way down the column. This corrects the error, wherever the heck it started.

We know the irritants presented by Quicken. It’s bloatware. It’s vaporware. The Mac version is clunkware whose files can neither be read by the PC version nor converted to a readable version. Your accountant, you can be sure, uses the PC version. And worst of all, its maker Intuit forces you to buy new, ever-more-bloated versions every time you take a deep breath. IMHO, these are very, very large irritants.

So, of course, is the difficulty of learning and manipulating Excel.

For me, just now it’s a toss-up. For a brief, not-so-shining moment last month, I considered running out and buying the latest version of Quicken to restart my books in 2011. But, on reflection, possibly not. Quicken’s biggest advantage over Excel is its ability to commune with your financial institutions. I’ve never felt moved to use that feature; my financial manager does the buying and selling of shares, and it’s pretty easy to access the credit union, the IRA, and the brokerage accounts online. Comparing and reconciling them is very simple, and I don’t need a piece of intermediary software to perform the desired transactions.

So. To the extent that one can be said to ♥ any software, I suppose I ♥ Excel.

What program do you prefer for bookkeeping, and why?

w00t! Cash shows up!

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Some of it, anyway.

Two of the three checks that went missing after I mailed them to the credit union almost two weeks ago have finally posted. Mercifully, one was from Google Adsense, an outfit whose customer service is so horrific I had about decided to just eat the $160 loss rather than try to do battle with them.

So $460 of the floating $560 has made it to shore. The hundred-dollar check from the limited partnership, which I’d posted in personal checking, has yet to surface. However, I had told the partnership that their check was disappeared, and so they may have already stopped payment on that check. Presumably they’ll issue a new one. But if not, a hundred bucks I can do without…five times that, no.

“Check’s in the Mail”: The checks that never return

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About two weeks ago, I e-mailed the credit union to ask if some franked, printed mailing envelopes I had on hand bore an address that was still correct for depositing checks by mail. Several branches had closed since the CU had given me these envelopes, and I wanted to be sure the address remained valid.

Well, no: as a matter of fact it wasn’t. The “Contact Us” people sent me a fistful of new envelopes plus a fistful of deposit slips, with no comment.

The sole convenient aspect of working on the main campus of Arizona State University was that a branch of the credit union resided in the basement of the student union. The West campus, which is closer than Main, also hosts a branch, but it’s not a lot handier to my house than Tempe. Although it’s only a 15- or 20-minute drive away there’s nothing else over in that part of town for me to do: no stores that I frequent other than a Costco that’s even further up the road, a big gasoline-gulp away from the Costco where I normally shop. By the time you’ve made a round trip to nowhere for the privilege of dropping off a few pieces of paper with a drive-up teller, you’ve killed an hour of your time to accomplish rather little. I find that frustrating.

Unfortunately, some clients cannot or will not do direct deposits. I had a check from Google—their online system through which you can request direct deposit doesn’t work any better for me than for the many other people who complain that it doesn’t work—a dividend check from a limited partnership, and a check from a publisher, amounting in total to about $500. Having many other things to do other than drive an hour to shuffle paper, I used one of the credit union’s self-addressed envelopes and a deposit slip to send them in.

Bad. Never do that.

The checks are now lost in the mail or at the credit union. It’s been two weeks, and there’s no sign of them.

Day before yesterday, I called the credit union and explained that I had dropped the envelope in the mailbox outside the local post office a long time ago and would like to know if the checks were in transit somewhere in their office. The answer was no; their customer disservice rep asked me to go to the post office and ask if they could trace the lost mail. I said I couldn’t imagine they would be able to find one piece of mail among the millions of envelopes that pass through their system. He said well, that was the policy.

So yesterday I traipsed over to the post office, waited a good 20 minutes in line, and told a P.O. customer disservice rep this story. She shrugged. “There’s nothing we can do about it,” said she, quite predictably and quite reasonably.

“Why do you suppose companies tell people to go to the post office and ask about lost mail,” said I, “when it’s pretty obvious that there’s no way you find one envelope among a zillion?”

“I don’t know,” said she, “but they do it all the time!”

So, five hundred dollars worth of checks for deposit are lost. I called the partnership and the publisher, each of whom said they’d try to stop payment on the checks. Apparently if someone has already cashed them, I’m just out the money.

Where the Google payment is concerned, I’m probably going to have to eat that. AdSense has exactly zero customer service. There’s simply no way to reach a human being. Every question is referred to Google’s uninformative website.

At that website, you find an option to cancel payment for a check that hasn’t arrived. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to tell them that they need to stop payment on a check that has arrived but has been damaged or lost. To put through a stop-payment order, I would have to lie and say the check never reached me. But it in fact did reach me, and I endorsed it and tried to deposit it.

Google moves with the speed of a galloping snail when it comes to dealing with customer issues. It also is notorious for canceling people’s accounts arbitrarily for any real or imagined offense. Obviously, if the check reaches the credit union before Google gets around to stopping payment on it, Google’s people (if there are any) will think I’m trying to steal $157 from them. So, rather than having the whole Google lash-up canceled just as it’s beginning to earn a little money, I guess I’m just going to have to let it go.

Makes me mad as a cat!

At any rate, the moral of the story is simple: Never send checks to the bank in the mail.

How to Move Your Money

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By now, I expect, you know there’s a movement afoot to get folks to transfer their cash out of the big banking institutions whose unregulated greed helped to bring on the Great Recession (if recession, not depression, is what it is).  Armed with a powerfully emotional video, the Move Your Money advocates urge megabank customers to take their business elsewhere—to small community banks or to credit unions.

I moved my money to a credit union quite some time ago, and I’ve never regretted it. Service is infinitely better. Tellers, who are not locked in cages but seated behind open, bright counters, recognize me by name when I visit, and a telephone call reaches a live human being. With a credit union, there are no nicks, gouges, or zings entailed in going about your normal banking activities. Loans are cheaper: just now car loans with 100 percent financing can be had for 4.99 percent, and M’hijito and I nailed a 4.3 percent mortgage over a year ago. Because the credit union never involved itself in questionable lending practices, it remains eminently solvent.

Problem is, moving your money is a bit more complicated than waving a wand, hollering presto-changeo, and rapturing all your cash from Institution A to Institution B, especially if you’ve set up automatic payments for recurring bills. So, assuming you see Wells Fargo, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Citigroup as tentacles of the Great Satan, how do you get free without incurring a raft of unexpected bank charges, without bouncing a check, and without accidentally shorting one or more of your creditors?

In my experience, the easiest and safest way to get your money out of a given bank is through a two-pronged process: set up new accounts in the target institution and then ease your way out of the soon-to-be-former institution. This may take as long as a month.

Start at the time you ordinarily reconcile your bank accounts, so that you can easily identify  transactions that have not yet cleared the first bank (let’s call it the First Avaricious Global Bank). Then follow these steps:

1. Cancel all automatic transactions. Check to be sure the cancellations actually go through. Pay any bills that are immediately pending with checks on your First Avaricious account.

2. Go to the new credit union or community bank (we’ll call it Benign Credit Union) and open a new account.

3. Arrange to stop any automatic deposits at First Avaricious and to have those deposits made at Benign Credit Union.

♦ It may take as long as a month for these changes to take place! Your employer may decide to issue a paper paycheck in the interim. This inconvenience will require you to stay alert to all transactions that occur at First Avaricious during the transition. Check your account online at least every other day.

4. Reconcile your accounts at First Avaricious and calculate the amount needed to cover uncleared transactions and the amount of money that will remain after all outstanding EFTs and checks have cleared. Write these numbers down. Let’s say this month you have $1,000 in outstanding transactions, and after those transactions have cleared, you’ll have $500 left.

5. Leave enough cash at First Avaricious to cover the outstanding transactions ($1,000) plus an additional amount to cover any little surprises—about $100 will probably suffice. So, you’re going to leave $1,100 at First Avaricious ($1,000 to cover uncleared transactions + $100)  and move $400 to Benign.

♦ First Avaricious will find every way from Sunday to ding you as you draw down your account. Many banks charge customers for dropping below a certain balance. Leave enough cash in the account to cover these gouges; otherwise you will incur more gouges in the form of overdraft charges.

6. With your paycheck and any other regular deposits now going to Benign Credit Union, begin paying your bills from your Benign account. Do not close your First Avaricious account until all outstanding transactions have cleared.

7. As soon as the last outstanding transaction clears First Avaricious, close your account there. Again, check to be sure the closure actually happens.

8. Deposit whatever remains of the $100 you left at First Avaricious in your Benign account.

9. Now set up all your automatic deposits, payments, and funds transfers at Benign.

Voilà! You’re back in business. And business will move a lot more smoothly.

Image: First National Bank of the Republic, Salt Lake City, 1908. Public Domain

Why I moved my money to a credit union

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As Americans lose patience with the overweening greed on display at certain gargantuan banking institutions, a lot of people are talking about moving their money out of megabanks into small community banks or credit unions. I moved my money to a credit union years ago…and thereon hangs a tale.

From the moment I graduated from college, I did business with banks. I’d never heard of credit unions, and when I did get wind of their existence, I didn’t understand what they were. I imagined they had something to do with labor unions.

Throughout our twenty-year marriage, Ex-DH and I kept our checking and savings accounts at what was then a statewide bank, founded by one of Phoenix’s early movers and shakers. We had a successful and mutually beneficial relationship with this bank, whose founder’s daughter was a classmate of Ex-DH’s at Stanford. But as time passed, things slowly deteriorated.

Shortly before we divorced, I came into a $40,000 inheritance. Naive as I was about personal finance at the time, I had no idea what to do with this money. I knew it should be invested, but I didn’t know where or how. I also knew I should keep it sole and separate from the marital community.

Incredibly, when asked what I should do with the cash, our personal banker advised me to invest it in seven-day CDs.

Yes. Forty grand got stuck in extreme short-term CDs earning something less than .5 percent—make that lots less. It sat there for over a year, as events progressed.

Once I was out of the marriage and free to get a grip on my own finances, I began to understand how astonishingly stupid this arrangement was. So I made an appointment with the same personal banker, whose services followed me into singlehood, to discuss what I should do with the inheritance and also how I should handle the alimony that now was coming into my account. She advised me to invest $30,000 in a municipal bond, on the theory that it was a conservative, safe place to park the cash, with the added benefit of tax-free proceeds.

That proceeds were minimal, that this strategy could tie up 30 grand for ten years? Nevermind…

As time passed, the bank was acquired by the now-defunct First Interstate Bank. Shortly, getting through to a human being grew well-nigh impossible. My old personal banker was replaced by a crew of CSRs, none of whom knew much about anything and all of whom seemed to be trained in the high arts of stonewalling.

First Interstate began to make various small errors. Because my math leaves a lot to be desired, it would take hours of anguished puzzling to figure out what went wrong, and still more cerebration to confirm in my own mind that an error had occurred on the bank’s part and not on mine. Each time this would happen, I would have to jump through flaming hoops to reach a person and then would have to do battle to prove some transaction—often one that cost me money in the form of various gouges—was the bank’s mistake. Even going in person to the main downtown office would result in a long wait to speak to a representative and a complicated discussion to get the point across, an activity that often resulted in no action.

Meanwhile, I learned that one of Ex-DH’s ex-law partners’ ex-wives had established a practice as a financial counselor. She specialized in advising single women. When I went to her to learn more about how to handle my finances, she advised me to cash out the municipal bond and invest in a mutual fund.

Before the bank was engrossed by First Interstate, I had arranged for the bank to keep the municipal bond, since as a new divorcée my life was pretty transient and I was concerned that the bond might get lost as I moved around. (As an example, I spent three months traveling on foot through the outback of Alaska and Canada, sleeping on the ground, hiking, and hitch-hiking.) Now, when I asked to have the bond, the CSR with whom I spoke said it would be FedExed to me.

No.

They dropped it in mail.

And predictably, it disappeared. Weeks later, no bond had surfaced. When I called, I found out they had put it in the USPS and lost it!

Yes. First Interstate lost a $30,000 bond!!!

And what did they propose to do about it?

Nothing.

They informed me that it was my problem, and I would have to go to the Postal Service and try to get them to find it.

Only after I complained to the federal banking commission and threatened to call the U.S. attorney general did a bank vice-president appear at my front door with the bond in hand.

About at this time, First Interstate was agglomerated into Wells Fargo. By then I had quite enough experience with large national banks, and so I moved my money to another bank, a small local institution with a branch near my house.

Before long, this bank began to falter. It also was consumed by one of the steadily bloating national megabanks, which promptly closed the nearby branch.

SDXB (Semi-Demi-Exboyfriend) had been lobbying me for quite some time to move my accounts into a credit union. Finally I began to pay some attention. By now I was working at Arizona State University’s west campus, which housed a credit union in one of the buildings. As a university employee, I was qualified to join (so, it develops, is just about anybody…).

So I opened an account. And to my great surprise, I encountered service very similar to the service Ex-DH and I got when we did business with a quaint local institution and he was a heavy hitter at one of the most prominent law firms in the Southwest. But this service was available to everyone, not just to a few elite customers! Call on the phone, and a human being answered. The car loan the credit union offered far underpriced anything available anywhere else. They even had a broker who would help you buy a car and insulate you from the horrors of having to do battle with car salesmen. Mistakes? What are those?

That service continues to this day. Although they now have a phone tree, it’s pretty easy to break through it, and their online help is prompt and accurate. Online banking services: awesome. ATMs: available everywhere, at no charge, thanks to deals with a network of credit unions. Solvency: excellent, because credit unions refrained from issuing bizarre loans to borrowers who obviously couldn’t pay. Deposit insurance: through a separate federal agency that is in no danger of being drained dry by the current spate of bank failures. Costs: almost nil—no checking account fees, no gouges for cashing checks, no costs unless you bounce a check.

What a wonder.

I would never do business with a bank again. Credit unions are the only way to go.

Image: Elembis, An Assortment of U.S. Coins. Public domain. Wikipedia Commons.