If you effective independently of your own, and acquisition it troublesome to maintenance track of your bourgeois and fish wrapper income and expenditure, here is a guide to how this can be done easily and effectively, based on personal experience.

What follows is the way I have been maintaining my personal account for a couple of years.

The Book

It is easy to buy small, diary-like booklets with plastic covers that are meant for keeping records and any miscellaneous task. The size is such as to fit in your shirt pocket easily. The pages are lined, without any other formatting. Each of these pages is to be used to record your daily expense, and the book accordingly divided into months. Write down the date on top of the page.

One book can be sufficient to maintain a quarterly account, but that anyway depends on how big it is. At the end of the month in the diary, keep one page as a summary of the month. This is where the monthly calculations will be shown income-expenses-net and a categorized division of expenses.

The Method

Make a habit, each night, of entering your daily expenses on that days page. If there are too many small expenses, group them under miscellaneous. There is no need to mention every small detail. Simply put breakfast to cover whatever you spend in the morning at breakfast. Or Travel to record all traveling expenses.

At the bottom of the page, write down the total expenses of the day, added to the expenses previously incurred. That is, each page will show the total amount that has been spent till that day over the month. This total is carried forward to the next day, and so on.

The Calculations

On the monthly summary page, make a simple income/expenses/net calculation on three lines. Now you would be interested to know how the money was spent - how much on breakfast, travel, entertainment, dinner, grocery, shopping, clothes, etc. Go through the daily page entries to sum up expenses under these categories. Wont take too much time to do this at the end of the month.

This page will show you concisely where you need to tighten the purse, the luxuries that need to be curtailed, or if you need to do some discount shopping.

After some time, you may feel like not doing such categorized calculations as by now you know how and where the money is spent. You may even simply enter the total amount spend on the day without mentioning details, especially when you forget to enter the details occasionally.

Miscellaneous Details

Use the back pages of the diary to enter all the financial details like your bank balance, deposits, debts, loans, investments, interests, etc. You may try to include these in the monthly records, or keep them separate.

The one good aspect of this record keeping is that, at a future date, you may want to know where you stand financially since you began. The systematic records will help you to calculate your financial position any time in the future.

Some western countries have weekly salary payments. You may try to adjust to that format.

The last thing to mention is this the whole point of keeping personal expenditure accounts is to be able to manage money and save it for the future. The human nature is such that our desires keep pulling us in all directions. The real control needs to be exercises on them. The records are dead entries. They would tell you what happened, but not how to stop things from happening.

The author is a freelance writer.