Originally Posted by hudsonsmith
If you are getting that involved, my recommendation would be to spring for the $30-40 and buy quicken or money (there are different flavors w/ different feature sets). Saves you from reinventing the wheel and has all the reports designed for you. Allows you to download transactions from your bank, credit cards, etc. If you own stocks or mutual funds it calculates your basis and gains for you (huge headache to do on your own). I've been using quicken since it was a dos program that fit on one 3.5" diskette and just upgraded again to the latest version.