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Computers

Quicken: Jumping ship

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In another two weeks, I’m jumping Intuit’s ship, diving off the side of the SS Quicken into the cool waters of Excel.

Over the past five years as a program administrator, I’ve learned just enough about how Excel works to set up a spreadsheet to operate as a checkbook. Using very basic skills (indeed), I’ve figured out not only how to create a running balance but also how to make Excel reconcile a checkbook against a bank statement. None of this is rocket science. What’s new is realizing I can make a generic program like Excel or its open-source equivalents do all I need Quicken to do.

Because I don’t use Quicken for online banking, my needs for the program are pretty plain-vanilla: keep track of expenses and income, categorize them, create an annual tax report, and reconcile bank accounts. Quicken’s various planning calculators, especially the ones related to loans, come in handy, but similar calculators are all over the Internet.

Nor do I use Turbotax, Intuit’s companion to Quicken, billed as the answer to all your income-tax reporting problems.

Why, you ask, do I eschew Quicken’s whiz-bang online features? Simple: I don’t trust Intuit, a corporation that issues ever-more-bloated versions of its program each year and then forces consumers to buy them by jimmying the code to render data entered in “older” programs unreadable. I can’t say how much I resent that. Also, customer service is nonexistent. It’s a consumer-unfriendly product manufactured by a consumer-unfriendly corporation. There is no way I’m going to put my personal data online through that outfit’s tentacles.

I do my online banking directly with the credit union, thank you. Every financial institution that does business with me makes online transactions and statements readily available. All I need to do that is a reasonably secure browser, say…Firefox running on a Mac, for example.

My taxes are so complicated, there is no chance on God’s green earth I could do them myself, nor would I trust Turbotax to stuff all my square pegs into its round holes. Income has, over the years, derived from salary, contract work, limited partnerships, securities investments, nontaxable bonds, mutual funds, a 403(b), an annuity, a whole life policy, alimony, Social Security, unemployment insurance, sales of real estate, a C-corporation, a sole proprietorship, an S-corporation…it goes on and on. A vast array of laws and loopholes applies to these things, none of them even faintly comprehensible to the amateur.

It’s also very frustrating that Quicken data will convert from PC format to Mac format, but not back. This means that when the day comes that I no longer can afford Macintosh computers—and that day arrived on Tuesday, after I bought the MacBook—to continue using Quicken I will have to start completely anew, losing all historical data. Excel operates smoothly on both platforms, and so I can move between the PC and the Mac with no problem.

After Canning Day, my banking strategy will be much simplified. Instead of disbursing paychecks into various piggybanks (one to cover the monthly credit-card bills; one to “escrow” the annual property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance; one for monthly savings; one for monthly nondiscretionary bills; one to pool all income; one for the S-corporation; a joint checking account with M’hijito to handle the mortgage payments…and so on ad infinitum), all incoming money will go into one checking account, which will have a $10,000 cushion to back up the poverty-level wages I’ll be making. Most expenses will be paid from this account. The self-escrow account will stay in business, since the only way I can be sure to have enough to cover those breathtaking bills is to set aside $325 a month, every month. I will try to set something aside each month in a savings account to cover budget overruns and buy occasional indulgences like clothing. And of course the joint checking account will have to stay.

That will cut the number of credit-union accounts from eleven to four, not counting the redundant savings accounts, which sit dormant and so really don’t need to be reconciled anyway.

Further simplifying matters is the S-corporation itself. When The Copyeditor’s Desk was a sole proprietorship, I ran business income and expenses through my personal checking and credit-card accounts. This meant I had to run a category report for the tax lawyer. Now all tax-related items except the mortgage interest and medical costs will go through CE Desk’s dedicated checking account. This will make it very easy to run out a report: everything related to FaM and CE Desk is gathered in one account. Mortgage interest is reported on a yearly form from the lender. That leaves only one category, “medical,” in my personal accounts to report on…and that’s easy.

Reconciling an account against a bank statement is also pretty easy in Excel. Just translate the instructions on the back of your statement into Excel actions:

First check off all the cleared transactions in your checkbook spreadsheet; changing their font color makes it easy to spot uncleared entries.  Then enter your current bank balance, subtract uncleared debits (checks and EFTs) and add uncleared credits (deposits). Click AutoSum (Σ) to total these figures.  Next, enter your bank statement’s ending balance, add any deposits made after the ending date, and subtract uncleared debits. Click AutoSum again to tote up those figures. Now compare the two totals: if you haven’t missed entering anything, then the two should be the same. If they’re different, you’ve made a mistake and need to recheck the figures in your checkbook spreadsheet.

NuHowToReconcile

So, how will this work with day-to-day bank and credit-card transactions? It’s easy to track credits (deposits) and debits (checks and electronic payments) in an ordinary spreadsheet. However, because I charge all my grocery and other discretionary spending on credit cards, paying them off in full at the end of each month, the single payment to American Express or Visa doesn’t show what, specifically, that payment covered. In Quicken, this failing can be addressed with split transactions. Since I don’t know how to enter a Quicken-style split transaction in Excel (or even if that can be done), I believe one would need a separate spreadsheet to track credit-card charges. In my case, this represents no extra work: I already do that in Quicken, because I make too many charges each month to stuff into a single split transaction.

So, we first set up a spreadsheet for the checking account:

To explain how Excel builds the figures in the “Balance” column, in the “Cleared” column I’ve noted the commands I entered in “Balance.” For those who are even less conversant with Excel than I am, here’s what I did: Place the cursor in the target cell; type the = sign and then click on the cells you want Excel to total; after each cell, enter a + sign.  In my first row, I’ve asked Excel to take the next cell under “Credit, “$10,000, and add it to the figure under “Debit,” which is blank, giving an opening balance of $10,000. That little green triangle on the opening balance is Excel complaining that no value appears in the second (“Debit”) cell. This is just whining—you can either ignore it or quiet the program down by entering a 0 in those blank cells.

This establishes the opening balance. To figure the running balance, remember that you have to include deposits as well as checks and electronic payments. So, I’ve gone to the second row, placed my cursor in the second cell under “Balance,” and asked Excel to take the previous figure under “credit” and add it to “debit” and then add these to the previous figure under “balance.” Because the debits are entered with minus signs (i.e., as negative numbers), using the + sign will cause Excel to subtract that figure from the series’ total. That is, you’re getting x + (-y) + (z).

(And yes, Virginia: that’s why we take algebra in high school or college!)

Now, to keep track of what that $800 paid to American Express was actually spent on, we have a second spreadsheet:

In this spreadsheet, I would like to know not only what specifically I’m diddling away money on, but also how much is left out of each month’s $800 credit-card spending budget. So under “credit” I enter the amount budgeted. This spreadsheet doesn’t represent a bank account and so never has to be reconciled. Consequently I can be a bit more casual here. I create the opening balance simply by copying the first make-believe “credit” into the “Balance” column. Now to make Excel do a running balance, all I have to do is ask it to subtract each debit from the preceding balance. I do this by entering an = sign in the first cell below the opening balance, then clicking on the first debit (notice that it also has a minus sign in front of it, making it a negative number), then entering a + sign, then clicking on the number right above, in the “Balance” column. This subtracted $86.50 from $800, showing $713.50 was left in the monthly budget. Now click on that “$713.50” cell, notice the little “knob” in the cell’s lower right-hand corner; grab that with the cursor and pull the cursor down the column. Every cell the cursor has swooped over will perform the same function as new values are entered in “credit” and “debit,” neatly keeping a running balance for you.

Nifty, eh?

Excel will default to show negative numbers in red, in parentheses—accountant-style. It also probably will default to give you plain-vanilla figures with only one decimal place, as it has done here. To adjust these formats to fit your taste, go to Format > cells and explore around…that’s about the only self-explanatory part of this program.

Come April, I’ll want to send a report on tax-related expenditures to my tax lawyer. It is possible to make Excel do reports, but I’ve never figured out how. The online “Help” manual is utterly incomprehensible to the English major’s mind, and the reports chapter in Excel for Dummies is also over my head. However, it’s easy to generate an English-major report by using the “sort” function. Here, I’m pasting entries from the check-register spreadsheet and entries from the credit-card spreadsheet into a single new spreadsheet and running a “sort” on them:

To sort a spreadsheet, highlight the data you want to sort and then go to Data > Sort. Here I’ve asked Excel to sort first by Category, then by Income, then by Expenses. The result appears above.

As I mentioned above, most tax-related transactions will now occur in the S-corporation. However, it develops that COBRA, Medicare, and long-term care premiums are tax-deductible, and of course these will be paid from personal checking.  So I’ve created a category, TR, to flag tax-related items. Sorting the data first by categories gathers transactions by category. From there, it’s easy to tote up the expenses or income in each category. To arrive at $388.09 worth of tax-related transactions, I clicked in a cell next to where those transactions are grouped, and entered the = sign + each figure in the TR category.

In this sheet, as you can see, it’s also very easy, to arrive at a whole year’s income and expenses: just put your cursor in the cell at the bottom of “Income” or of  “Expenses” and click the AutoSum icon (looks like a Greek letter Σ).

Excel is easier than it looks. Describing these maneuvers, even in plain English, makes them look harder than they are.

Macquisition

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So! Yesterday I scored a new 15-inch MacBook from the Apple store, at an educator’s discount slightly lower than the one offered at GDU’s computer store. Not only that, but they threw in a wireless Epson printer, free!

Actually, I upgraded the freebie to a printer/scanner. I’m interested to see how the Epson does: it appears to be much better made than the HP, less flimsy and far more elegant in design. It was only $50 more; I figure I can resell my hulking HP on Craig’s List for that much.

They also threw in a 50% discount on next year’s Mobile Me subscription, a little extravagance that I figure The Copyeditor’s Desk will have to pay for, assuming it earns that much in the future.

In addition, I got a year’s worth of one-on-one coaching. First thing they’ll do for me, they said, is synch up my iMac with the laptop and, if I wish (for a slight extra fee), they will upgrade the iMac to Snow Leopard. The salesman claimed they also would load the $65(!) MS Office for Mac I bought at the GDU bookstore, though I doubt that: normally anything with the letters MS attached to it is as water to oil for the Apple Genius crew.

Snow Leopard is really inexpensive, especially compared to other operating systems. It’s supposed to be the wave of the future, so I think I may spring for the modest cost to do that.

What a beautiful and elegant machine it is! Smooth, rounded, pretty…just like its operating system.

The Mac is such a creature of the Internet! The instant an infant Mac breaks out of the egg, it wants to get online. It’s chirping to be connected to the cable router, but since I don’t know how to accomplish that, it’ll have to wait till M’hijito can come over and set it up. {sigh} Much as I want to play with it, I have no idea which of the half-dozen potential connections that come up is mine. It “sees” all the neighbors’ wireless stuff, but without a little encouragement, it doesn’t see the router. At least, I don’t think it does. If it does, I don’t recognize it.

For $150, I can get an AirPort Extreme, which is said to be superior to the cheapie we bought at Fry’s Electronics. I suppose I can afford it, although we’re pushing the limits of what CE Desk can pay. And anything that’s not sitting in the corporate account is money I’ll have to use for groceries and running the house.

However, it looks like I’m going to spring free of Quicken, whose onerous requirements for upgrades are past due for me. So that will save seventy or eighty bucks.

Uh-oh! La Maya on the phone with an intelligence alert: Estate sale in Richistan! w00t!

Gotta go: we hit the road in 20 minutes.

Later!

Computers

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I need to buy a laptop to replace the aging Dell that will have to go back to GDU in the next couple of weeks. I hardly use the Dell anymore, not because I wouldn’t prefer to sit in a comfortable chair or out on the patio, but because it’s a nuisance to operate, and because it doesn’t readily connect with my router.

The one good thing I can say about Qworst is that their online connection was wireless and so I could use the laptop anywhere on the property. My Cox DSL connection comes into the house by cable. M’hijito attached a router so we could set up AirPort and also, putatively, so I could get online with the Dell. But the Dell won’t talk with the router unless it’s in the same room with the thing, and so it’s quite a hassle to get that machine online. And since I live online, that’s why I quit using the Dell.

I’ve been thinking about replacing it with a MacBook.

Before you faint dead away: even though it’s expensive, I can get a pretty good deal with my educator’s discount, bringing the price down significantly. And I can get a new Office for Mac at the GDU bookstore for just $85, which I can use not only  to upgrade the iMac but also to load into the proposed MacBook.

There’s way more cash in savings than I need to survive on, and some of that is in the S-corporation. Indeed, even after the S-corp pays my wages, it still has more than enough to buy a MacBook. That allows me to pay for the thing with tax-free money. Because FaM alone will earn more than the cost of the computer next year (not counting whatever freelance schemes come my way), it’s quite reasonable to run the purchase through the corporation.

The iMac is getting old, as computers go (yeah! more than 18 months!). If it craps out, I’ll need another Mac to run my Quicken, since you apparently can’t convert Quicken for Mac QDFM files to something readable on a PC. When the iMac dies, the MacBook can take its place.

These, I think, are reasonable excuses for buying a Mac over an cheap PC, which is likely to crap out long before even the aging iMac goes.

Then there’s the sheer pleasure of using a Mac. Except for the lack of keyboard commands in Word (actually, they are there: they’re just different and I haven’t gotten around to memorizing them), I’ve come to much prefer using the Macintosh over either of GDU’s PCs.

• In the first place, MS Windows is such bloatware. God, it’s full of trash. And I don’t like the new version of Office, which has eliminated the clues to keyboard commands and tries to funnel you toward endless pointing and clicking and forces you to try to figure out how to work it by interpreting pictures. And the damn antivirus stuff is a constant, unending pain in the tuchus. So are the similarly constant, unending updates and patches. Every time I turn around, the laptop is sending me a message than in XX seconds it’s going to shut down everything I’m working on and reboot, so as to install yet another update. The campus laptop nags constantly for updates, too, but at least it doesn’t shut you down in mid-project.

• The Mac is elegant, clean, and relatively virus-proof. Yes, I do know hackers have Apple in their crosshairs. But though that’s been true for several years, they still haven’t made much headway. The constant virus and malware attacks on Microsoft programs make using a PC a real hassle.

• I’ve never had one single compatibility problem with reading Microsoft programs on the Mac. That is not true with the PC. “Old” (heh!) MS Office versions will not read the infuriating new .docx files generated by the current version of Word. This clearly is a device to force Microsoft users to spend wads of cash for unnecessary upgrades to their software. Well, the Mac will open a .docx file in TextEdit and save it as an .rtf file or as a .doc file, with all the formatting intact. If I hadn’t had a Mac, I would have had to upgrade to expensive new software when the new Office came out.

• True, I didn’t like being forced to upgrade to Leopard or whatever cat the current operating system is called. But that flap forced me to move FaM off iLife onto WordPress, a far superior program, and since FaM has migrated to BlueHost, it’s more than paid for the software upgrade. At least when Apple drags you into the 21st century, you get something worth being dragged for.

• What’s more, Apple has actual, real live customer support, with “Geniuses” who know what they’re doing.

So it goes. This morning I’m going to make an unplanned trip out to GDU, where the bookstore is selling Office for the Mac for an incredible $85, a nice markdown on the $150 the Apple store sells it for.  Wednesday I have an appointment to buy a MacBook, which provides a couple days to think about it.

Posting bookmarks online

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The Mac has about a zillion bookmarks, most of them accrued since I started blogging a year ago. Many of these are things I’d like not to lose when the hard disk crashes, which as we know sooner or later it will. They’re backed up, of course, to a flash drive, which holds a lot of other “don’t-lose” stuff. But that doesn’t help me get at these bookmarks from a PC. More to the point: I can’t access most of my Mac bookmarks from FireFox, because FireFox apparently has a strict limit on the number of bookmarks it will read. It doesn’t see all of Safari’s main bookmark folders, and when you get into a folder, it doesn’t see all the bookmarks inside a large folder.

Annoying, since we’re urged to prefer FireFox over Safari for a number of reasons, not the least of them security.

Belatedly, though, I’ve discovered Google Bookmarks. This is a very handy tool. You get it by establishing a Google account (free: just open a gmail address) and installing Google’s toolbar. The bookmarking function appears on the toolbar. When you’re signed in to a Google account, the bookmarks you entered while you were lurking around that account show up on the bookmark button of the toolbar.

The clever Tina, my associate editor at the Great Desert University and my business partner at The Copyeditor’s Desk, set up a Google account for us quite some time ago. We use the e-mail account for our company address and Google Docs for tracking assignments and posting communal style sheets. Very handy. This enables her to view the bookmarks, too.

So I used that account to enter bookmarks from my GDU terminal as well as from the Mac. The campus terminal has a lot of links to university sites, purchasing agents, and the like. The Mac has most of the links for editorial blogs as well as the 87 gerjillion PF blogs I follow. I’m sure she’s not interested in personal finance blogs, but she has evinced an interest in blogging in general (having experimented with her own online journal at WordPress, she was amazed to find people actually reading it). I’ve posted 10 categories of blogging-related sites, from how-to squibs and SEO advice through complicated dissertations on monetizing. Someday she may find those useful. And maybe she’ll add some of her own favorite sites.

It’s neat to be able to share bookmarks with a limited audience. But what I really like about it is that if one or the other of my systems crashes, I won’t have to reconstitute long lists of URLs from some outdated back-up file. Yay!

And it’s free.
🙂

Back again…temporarily?

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What’s more annoying than a punch-a-button phone maze? A robot that answers the phone!

Qwest’s DSL connection went down around 8:00 this morning, just before I left for work. After dinner tonight, I called the Philippines in hopes of finding a tech who could figure out how to fix it.

Make that “I tried to call the Philippines.” All of Qworst’s online tech help appears to be based in Manila. But you can’t get to them without trudging past a robot gatekeeper animated with a peculiarly infuriating smug voice. By the time I reached the first live human — get this: after the oily robot actually cooed “hold on while I make a note of that”!!! — I was so enraged I could barely speak.

So now I have this Filipina techie on the phone and she’s asking me how the DSL contraption is acting. Following what is clearly a canned routine, carefully enunciating a script, she guides me through a number of little tests: disconnect and reconnect this, that, and the other. These require me to climb on top of the desk and fiddle with the gadget, because I can’t pick the gadget up easily because the cords, which are too short to start with,are snugly tucked in along the back of the desk to keep all that junk off the floor. Many of the connections are invisible to me, even with my head upside down and jammed up tight against the wall. But none of these experiments work, anyway.

Next she gets me down on the floor, upside down under the desk. “Unplug the telephone line from the wall socket and plug it back in,” she says.

Ohhh-kayyyyy….

Not surprisingly, this strategy disconnects me from the Philippines.

I call back and get the same enraging robot. By now I’m so angry I’m choking and so the robot doesn’t understand what I’m trying to say, possibly because some of it isn’t printable. I slam the phone down and dial “0.” Applying a superhuman effort, I stay polite long enough to ask the operator if she could please connect me to a human being. “Sure,” she says: and connects me right back to the same effing robot!!!!!

By the time the robot ran me through another 8 or 10 minutes of the same enraging hoops (asking questions that the live human would soon repeat, again), I was so furious I found it extremely difficult to be courteous to the poor wretch who finally picked up the phone.

He now starts to repeat the same series of instructions, word for word, that his compatriot so recently fed into my ear. I explain that I’ve already done those things and none of them worked. I also explain that unplugging the telephone from the wall causes the phone to disconnect. He, being smarter than the average bear, says, “Well…do you have another cordless phone in the house?’

Uhhmm, yeah. Duh!

“Go get it,” he says.

So now we disconnect the phone line from the wall socket and reconnect it, to no avail. DSL is still nonfunctional.

He concludes the unit is broken and says Qworst will send a new modem, which is to arrive on Friday. Once this wonder gets here, I have three weeks to return the old one or be charged a hundred bucks for it. I express my appreciation for this charming demand and the graceful terms in which it is couched. I also suggest to him that if he is earning less than $20 an hour, he is being underpaid and he and his workers should unionize and demand a decent wage.

He says he’ll make a note of that.

I say, “Here’s how you spell it: h-u-e-l-g-a. That’s v-i-v-a l-a h-u-e-l-g-a!“ Then, so infuriated am I at the maddening robotic hoops and the barely competent customer service, I remark that after three interactions with Qworst’s smug robot, I’m beginning to understand what motivates people to wrap themselves in explosives and blow up corporate headquarters.

So, I expect the next post you read from this blog will come to you from Cuba.

All this notwithstanding, the DSL mysteriously came back online, which explains why this last post is reaching you from Arizona.

How hard is it to have a human being pick up the phone? And what makes the executives of a faceless corporation think a) that anyone on the planet wants to be run in circles by a smug-sounding robot voice, or b) that even one of its customers is so stupid as to believe “your business is important to us” when they can’t spring for the subminimum wage required to have a nice citizen of the Philippines answer the G.D. phone?

Tomorrow, assuming I’m not riding a black helicopter to Guantanamo Bay,I intend to find out what’s involved in switching to Cox. Can I even get a cable internet connection without having to sign up for cable television that I’ll never watch? If so, can I get out of Qworst’s nonservice? We shall see.

Lessons learned from a computer crash

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First: Don’t believe a Mac is any more reliable than a PC. It’s not.

Second: Never believe what Apple’s sales staff tells you. When I bought the Mac, I specifically asked if the Quicken data the Apple Geniuses obligingly converted to Macintosh format could be converted back to PC format, in case I didn’t care for the platform. They said there would be no problem. That turns out not to be true. A Mac-compatible Quicken data file can not be converted to a PC-readable format. Thus, if you’ve faithfully backed up your Quicken data every time you enter transactions and you own only one Mac, after it crashes you may never be able to retrieve your data-especially if your version is out of date and a newer version of Quicken won’t read it. (Remember, this is one of Quicken’s devices to force consumers to keep buying new, unneeded software: if you decline to buy each bloated new version, when you go to buy a new computer and have to install the current version, you may find all your old data is unreadable.)

Third: However, you can save a Quicken file to PDF format. You can do this with transaction reports and with entire account registers. I don’t know if it’s a function of Acrobat Professional, which resides on all my terminals, or if Quicken will make PDFs on its own, but I think it’s the latter. The process is very easy: simply print to a PDF.

While a PDF of course has no functionality, it does at least save your data in a format readable on both platforms, and PDF files are extremely stable. As such, they provide a last-ditch back-up. If everything in Quicken crashes and for some reason (there certainly are reasons!) you can’t get back into your QDF files, you at least can get at the data so that you can re-enter it in a new version of the program or into Excel.

Fourth: The relationship between Intuit and Apple is tenuous, and Mac-compatible versions of Quicken for Mac are pale (often annoying) shadows of Quicken for PC. Although Intuit alleges that it will come out with a spectacular new Mac version so ground-breaking it must be rebranded “Quicken Financial Life for Mac,” believe it when you see it.

Consider using Excel for bookkeeping. This requires you to forego the swell online communication with your bank and investment brokers…but really. How necessary is that, in the large scheme of things?

Fifth: The capability to back up Quicken data files to MobileMe is dubious. For one thing, it’s unclear whether the file is stored with a .qdf extension, and so it’s equally unclear whether the file can be used to reconstruct lost data. Then there’s the alarming fact that one of Apple’s online support gurus told me flatly Quicken cannot be backed up to MobileMe. The store’s manager denies it, but given the contradictory tales that have come at me from all directions, I believe it’s smart to put that bit of intelligence somewhere other than in the circular file.

For this reason, all QDF files should be backed up to an external hard drive and also to a flash drive. If there’s any chance you will not have access to a second Mac loaded with Quicken, also back up your account registers in PDF format.

Sixth: iWeb’s blogging function is resident on your computer and only on your computer. Thus if your computer crashes, your blog is gone. Gone for good. Unless you’ve backed up the content of your site, it can’t be retrieved; the Genius who revealed this gem was unclear whether saved data can be imported into iWeb on a new computer. If you start anew on a fresh computer without having imported your old posts, even if you can access your blog site (a matter that appears to be questionable), the minute you publish a new entry you will erase all your blog’s archival content.

Never, ever do a blog on iWeb!