I’ve been having the same trouble as you. I do most of my banking electronically and I almost always flub up, to the point of bank fees.

I like your idea of entering the withdrawals at the beginning of the month.

I do it all somewhat differently. I basically go to zero-based budget route. I have my budget on a spreadsheet and as the month goes on I add my paycheck and subtract the money I use. At the end, any money that is left (which is usually none at the moment) goes into savings. I use my credit card for almost all of my expenses and purchases so I basically never have to worry about needing a buffer in my checking account. And then I pay off my credit card once a month. This may need to change in the future, but for now it works for us.

I keep a detailed expense spreadsheet where I track all money going in and coming out. I find that this works better for me because I can see what I spend my money on. If I use an ATM to get some cash I find that if I don’t track the actual expenditure the money vanishes.

As for checks… I use them to write myself checks from one bank to the next and other than that they are simply there for VOID checks. One little book of checks lasts me literally years.

I used GnuCash software (on my Ubuntu) to keep track of my finance. It’s opensource, and I heard that it has most of the functionality that you can find in Microsoft Money & Quicken. I highly recommend it.

For awhile I was using some custom finance software that I had written, before I realized that it was just too much for what I needed. I sat down one night and wrote up a quick Excel Spreadsheet (much as you described) and have added onto it ever since.

I have everything broken down by month and maintain a transaction date, description, recipient, category, cleared status and value.

I keep two running totals, one is what the bank thinks I have and one is what I really have (this is achieved by using the cleared column). I check the bank every few days for any missed transactions and ensure that I’m always on balance.

Here’s where I get fancy. I maintain a pivot table alongside each month’s “ledger” that breaks out values spent based on category. Then, alongside that I maintain my “budget” and can instantly see where I went wrong! For instance, this month the sum of budgeted automotive and real automotive ends up being negative, meaning that I went over my budget (my wife’s fuel pump seal died).

I also do some futzing with certain goals, incremental payments (saving for tuition, emergency and that sort) and then give a total of remaining funds letting me know how much I’ve got extra this month for fun!

I use moneywent.com… it is brand new but so far I like it. I know exactly where my cash goes.
It’s free and you can access it from anywhere.
http://www.moneywent.com

(disclosure- I did help develop it but this post was a perfect place to share it.)

If your account has no overdraft (as mine does), is there any tangible benefit to doing this?

The only reason I can see is that you’ll notice suspicious transactions, which is a very real benefit. However when weighed against the time and effort it would take for me to keep track of this in a schedule that I already feel is too cramped, I don’t do it.

Thoughts?

I pay everything on my credit card. i pay that once a month. everything else is fixed like rent, cellphone bill, etc except utility bill.
whats there to balance?

I use AceMoney to keep track of all my various accounts with banks, brokerages, TreasuryDirect, eBay, etc. I much prefer it to Quicken, Quickbooks, or Money. At $30 for the full version and life-time updates, I thought it was pretty reasonable. I’m not always diligent at manually keeping up with record-keeping, so about once a month, I export my records for various accounts as .QIF files and import them into AceMoney. Usu. takes another 15 minutes to 1/2 to make sure everything is reconciled correctly. I also update the prices of stocks I’ve entered into my to-watch list every once in a while. The reporting/graphing feature is very nice and easy to use.

And here I thought I was so clever! I developed our Excel spreadsheet in January and so far it has been great. However, we are notorious “nickel and dimers”, so it is A LOT of data entry and checking the bank’s website. I think the key is probably a cash allowance for the small stuff, but it seems to go faster that way!

I do not balance my checkbook I don’t even have a checkbook, I use my credit card for everything utilities,food, car insurance etc. and pay it in full each month. Therefore I rarely need cash or make atm withdrawls. My credit card gives me 1% cash back,(they actually send a check each month with the bill) so I actually earn about $35 per month. We previously struggled with overdrafts with two people using the same account so this works better. I also use paytrust bill pay service to pay everything else, it keeps track of my outstanding checks and I can schedule quarterly or yearly payments such as hoa dues or property tax so that I will not forget. At tax time I can just run reports and all of my expenses are categorized. Paytrust charges a fee but aside from my credit card charges I have to pay about 40 other business related bills.For me paytrust pays for itself in that just buying stamps and checks and the time to write them would cost more.And I would be drowning in paper because your bills actually get mailed to paytrust and they scan them.