Unexcused Absence
Filed under: Business, Tracking Spreadsheet
It’s been two weeks to the day since I last posted about watching the utility company walk away with my hard-earned money. I have to say, that was a very demoralizing day. After dealing with that fiscal blow, I just didn’t feel like doing any writing on top of my normal daily efforts.
Then, last week, my business finally started taking off as I landed my first long-term client. I knew running my side business would take a lot of time, but it really caught me off guard how much time it would actually take. Over the last two nights, I’ve spent about 8 hours writing work proposals and doing research. After a full month of zero business, it was a breath a fresh air to know I’ll start seeing some incoming funds, but it will still take a lot of work to get there.
So today, after all the busyness of the last two weeks, I decided it was time to get back on the horse and start writing again. Just like my business, this blog can’t grow if I don’t work on it and I love writing here too much to let it die. Over the coming days there will be more updates on both the financial health of our family and the business. I’ll be closing January’s books and preparing my end-of-month reports early next week, so we’ll take some time then to analyze our expenses and see how things have changed since December.
To those of you who have downloaded the expense tracking spreadsheet, has it worked well for you? How have you tweaked your copy to give you the data you want?
I’m currently using some of my company time to develop a simple web-based application to replace the spreadsheet and give better access to its data. What kind of features would you like to see in that application? Would you pay for it if it included certain features, or would you expect it to be free and advertiser-supported?
I look forward to seeing what you think.
February 2nd, 2008 at 6:21 pm
To be perfectly candid, I’d been curious, but when I saw I’d have to download a compatibility pack and that the spreadsheet still might not be fully functional, I decided it wasn’t worth it. The old Pearbudget template meets my needs just fine. I don’t anticipate ever being willing to pay for budgeting software when there are fine free options available, including just building my own system in Excel.
All I really need is something to keep track of my expenses and determine how much of my month’s budget I still have left to spend. I used a little ten cent notebook for a while, and it worked just fine. I switched to doing that on a computer after I found myself recalculating how much I had left after every single purchase.
February 2nd, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Fair enough.
I wrote the spreadsheet for my own use in Excel 2007 (it includes some features I wanted that weren’t in 2003) and Google Spreadsheets doesn’t do pivot tables. I just hoped what I wrote might be helpful for someone else or inspire them to tweak it for their own needs.
I will likely not charge for the basic feature set for the online version and it will certainly have more features than the spreadsheet. I already have some ideas for improvements and features that I’ll need to write a program for. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks.