This project will be made up of a bunch of \"receipts\"; that is the basic unit.

Question

This project will be made up of a bunch of "receipts"; that is the basic unit.

Each "receipt" will have a date and time. I'd like to be able to enter my receipts in any order (they are all in a big pile!) and then sort them by date and time.

Each "receipt" will comprise of a heading line, and then underneath that, indented lines for each item on that receipt. Each item will have a category (used to see, for example, how much I'm spending a month on categories such as "junk food", "essentials", "hygeine", etc).

So, for example, one receipt might look like this:

May 02 2014 / 1:23pm / Wal-Mart / 11.13$   
-------- 2.50$ / underwear / clothing   
-------- 2.50$ / doritos / junkfood   
-------- 5$ / milk / groceries   

My intention is to have one spreadsheet full of these receipts, and then (after sorting them by date), manually cut and paste them into separate spreadsheet files (one file per month), where at the end of each of those files I can sum up a report of how much I spent that month for each category.

One person said that I should be using a database instead of a spreadsheet; is this true? Can I still sum up the expenses for each category, for any given month, using a database?

My database knowledge is very basic. How should I structure the table if I go with a database? Should I have one table that holds the fields of Date, Time, StoreName, TotalCost, and also a field that itself is a table that holds various Items (each with fields of Price, Name, and Category)?

Explanation / Answer

You can do this with a simple database (you need a Unique/Join key to match the LineItemDetailTable to the ReceiptHeaderTable) and you need to know how to do select statements to retrieve the data. You should also know how to create a drop down list box for standardized entries (storename, category).

You can do this with a series of spreadsheets - Tab1 being your Input Data containing columns of standardized Storenames and PurchaseCategoryTypes (clothing, junk food, etc). Tab2,3,4 could be VLookup or HLookup from InputTab based on which subset you're trying to view. Excel or OpenOffice would be fine for this. Cut&Paste is error-prone and time consuming. Let the computer do the work, you just tell it how once.

You can do this in Quicken (cheaper & less complicated than QuickBooks), possibly MSMoney but I'm not familiar with that package, breaking each receipt into its components in the "splits" field. This would also allow the individual category spending report.

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