How do you organize your finances?

I've been using a "Do It Yourself" approach for a few years now and I find it works great for me.

I keep a google spreadsheet and every payday (bi-weekly) I make a new column in the sheet with the date and log into all my accounts to make a note of how much I have in each one. I've been doing this for 3+ years now and it's really cool to be able to go back to any pay period and see exactly what all my accounts were at for that time.

It's definitely a manual process and certainly not for everyone but I feel that I've almost gamified getting paid in a way where I look forward to filling out a new column in the spreadsheet every payday.

I've been using a spreadsheet for years, as that's the only tool that was flexible enough. For me my personal finance is as important as my business finance (2 man company), knowing the health of my complete economy have allowed me to invest my money better.

But a spreadsheets becomes slow and tiresome, and has limits to it's automation. So I though about it long term, in 5 years time would I like if I had my own system? A few months ago I started building one. Not sure if it will become a service for others, but I know the future me will have better control of my economy.

Well, I do use regular accounting software for my company, but it's not helping me see how much runway we really do have.

HubDoc feeds into Receipt Bank and archives historic banking data.

Physical receipts feed into Receipt Bank via mobile app (take a picture).

Digital receipts and invoices feed into Receipt Bank via email forward, dropbox sync, online upload.

Receipt Bank, after semi-manual processing, feeds into Xero. (Semi-manual, because it is a SaaS that parses receipts and invoices for you, but they are not 100% and need some manual processing to get to 100%).

Xero pulls bank transactions from all accounts (bank, credit cards, paypal).

Reconcile in Xero once a month or more, depending on volume.

If you time tracking, Harvest can export invoices into Xero.

If you have recurring invoices (e.g. retainers), Xero can handle that automatically.

Xero can also handle payment acceptance via Stripe, Paypal.

So, all in all, Xero is my master database of all of the financial data and reporting. All other apps feed data into that.

In a couple of different ways and it's different for personal and business.

• To track all email receipts for the many services I use Oficin. Built by me to tackle the mess it was to get every single receipt to my accountant to do my books.
• Am about to (publicly) launch Vynaca to get more and better insight into the overall expenses, revenue and future cash flow.
  The tricky and difficult stuff is then handled by my accountant, who makes sure all numbers do match up with reality. After a certain amount of revenue, I can highly recommend hiring an accountant. They will pay for themselves easily.

Furthermore, I use Trail wallet to track my day-to-day spendings. Since I travel continuously, it's useful and interesting to see what costs are for every city I visit and live in.
I also just started to use Revolut which should help to manage costs a bit more (still in the progress of moving credit cards).

For business finances I use Xero for bookkeeping, invoicing, etc. And I have an accountant that handles my taxes, corporate structures and any financial statements I need to submit to the government.

For personal finances I've put together a basic rough budget for my wife and myself in a google sheets document following the Barefoot investor general guidelines for allocation. The accountant from above specializes in family businesses so they also handle all our personal tax filings as part of the business package.

Excel. ;-)

My wife and I have a sheet which merges together both our business incomes, private spendings, savings, emergency buckets, etc.

We use it to forecast income and bigger expenses, cashflow, an income tax estimation to avoid surprises. The recurring things are included, the monthly private expenses are tracked with a Smartphone App.

It grew quite large but I guess its the flexibility which makes me like it. And also of course the peace of mind ...

I use WaveApps.com for freelance-related work -- it's pretty handy for sending proposals, invoices, and tracking bank accounts.

For side projects (like currently, Guidable.org), I start with a spreadsheet; but then will probably migrate up to something a little more powerful when I understand what needs I have.

For personal finance (though it would probably work well for business too): I use YNAB (https://www.youneedabudget.com/) -- it's amazing. It takes about an hour or so to understand, but it's worth it.

I use ClevMoney app to keep track of my income, expenses and investments. I manually feed the in into the app in real time as soon as I make a transaction. It's boring but being in control of my business numbers makes it worth it :)