Tracking expenses

For two months now I have been tracking expenses and expenditures. I want to get a handle on our spending. I purchased a columnar Pad to record the receipts. I try to save every receipt, even if I buy a pop. I don't really know a good way to make it readable and usable. Today at Money Saving Mom she has four programs you can download for free to track your expenses. Jeff downloaded one for me and is tweaking it to fit us.

Since I have only recorded one month of expenses in the columnar pad I plan to go back and put those figures into the new expense tracker. I had wanted to make it a habit of keeping receipts and tracking expenses so I could do it all through 2011. That is why I started at the beginning of November, to begin training myself so in 2011 it would already be a habit.

In the columnar pad I had to add each column by hand, with the downloaded system I don't have to add things up.

I should get my ereader today and am hoping that I might be able to transfer the program to it and then I could enter the receipts almost as soon as I get them. Certain receipts I will and do keep for a period of time in case we need to return something, but for many receipts if I can enter them quickly then I can dispose of them. I am getting excited about this new system.