Getting started
You don’t need to know accounting to manage your own money. This short introduction explains the few ideas AceMoney Classic is built on, then walks you through your first account and your first transactions.
Accounts and transactions
A transaction is a record that changes your account balance. You’ve probably seen a lot of them in credit card statements: charges at the grocery store or department store, credit for returned goods, and bill payments. There are three major transaction types: a deposit (when you add money to the account), a withdrawal (when you spend money from the account) and a transfer (when you move money from one account to another). A transaction has an amount, a spending category and a payor or payee.
Amount is simple — it’s just a sum of money. Sometimes the amount is split, such as when part of your paycheck goes to taxes and the rest goes to you. It is still a single transaction, but it has several parts inside it, and AceMoney Classic handles those splits for you.
Category is a tag for planning and reporting. At the end of the month it’s interesting to know how much you’ve spent on toys for your kids (or electronic toys for yourself). When you plan your budget, you set limits by category. You can live without categories if all you want is a copy of your bank statement, but they give you a whole new level of control over your money — and a year’s summary by category can be a surprise. (You spent how much at the pub?!)
Payee is the person or company — a supermarket or a gas station, for example — that receives money from your account. A payor, such as an employer, is one who pays you. AceMoney Classic calls the other side of a transaction the payor/payee. At the end of the year you might want to know how much you spent at a warehouse club to judge whether its annual fee pays off.
An account is a list of transactions. The simplest example is the cash in your pocket. Some accounts are linked to a bank, and you may want to keep the bank’s details with them. From now on you have control over the transactions in each of your accounts: a wrong amount charged by a careless or dishonest vendor no longer goes unnoticed.
Your first account
Everyone has a cash account, so let’s start there. Start AceMoney Classic, open the Accounts menu and choose Add new…. In the dialog, give the account a descriptive name — “Pocket cash”, say — choose the account group Cash, and click OK.
Your first transactions
Double-click the account in the list of accounts to open its register. Let’s start with some income — a paycheck. A paycheck is really a split transaction: your net pay is what’s left of your gross pay after taxes, retirement contributions, insurance and so on. To keep that detail, add a new transaction, click Split and enter each deduction as its own line. If you’d rather keep it simple, enter the net amount with a single category such as Wages.
Say your employer, Mr. Dobkins LLC, pays you 1,500 dollars. Click the New transaction button, choose Deposit, and enter the payor (Mr. Dobkins LLC), the category (Wages and Salary › Net Pay) and the amount (1,500).
Click OK and the transaction appears in the account’s register.
Your balance is now 1,500. But you already had about 1,000 in your pocket before the paycheck arrived. That’s easy to fix: click Account properties, enter 1,000 as the Opening balance, and click OK. The balance is now 2,500.
Now some shopping: you spent 100 on groceries at Walmart. Add a Withdrawal with Walmart as the payee, Food › Groceries as the category and 100 as the amount.
The balance is now 2,400. The transaction has a category and a payee, so AceMoney Classic can report your spending by category, by payee, or both. That’s the whole idea: track your income and expenses this way, with a category and a payor or payee on every transaction.
Tips
Reconcile with your statement. Once a month, check your bank statement against AceMoney Classic: right-click each transaction on the statement and mark it reconciled.
Import instead of typing. If your bank lets you download statements in QIF format, save the file and choose File › Import in AceMoney Classic, then pick the account to import into.
Money you lend. The easy way is a category such as “Loan:Name” and a transaction report on it: the report’s total is what is still owed. Or create an account for the person who owes you: your loan is a transfer to that account, each repayment a transfer back, and the account’s balance shows what is owed at a glance. When the debt is paid off, mark the account closed in its properties.
Recurring transactions. Set up paychecks and utility bills in the Schedule screen. When a bill arrives, press Enter to accept it. The paycheck above, for example, can be scheduled as a deposit every two weeks.
What’s next?
Explore the application and find the way of managing your money that suits you. And back up your data at least twice a month: this kind of information is hard to rebuild without a backup.