Help me devise a customized spending reporting system

July 23, 2015 11:39 AM

I want to provide updated weekly or daily report of our spending to my wife. Here's what I want to do: 1. Track expenses in MS Money (I've been using for 11 years, not negotiable) 2. Export Report from MS Money into a drive on my computer (or can e-mail csv to an e-mail address) 3. File gets synced somehow 4. Wife goes to a URL and can read the csv, potentially formatted in her browser whenever she likes.

I don't really care if someone sees the information, but obviously I don't want them to be able to backdoor onto my computer.

I've built websites and have experience with Unix, sftp. I have server space where I can upload.

We use mint, but that's more a way to see all transactions and our categorization there is more work than my current process.

posted by sandmanwv to Technology (5 answers total)

Put your report into a shared Dropbox folder? You can also get a URL from Dropbox if you want to make it accessible in an internet browser.
posted by Seboshin at 11:45 AM on July 23, 2015

You might be able to create a recipe on IFTTT for this. Send the csv to your IFTTT account and have it add the rows to a spreadsheet on Google Drive.
posted by dawkins_7 at 1:00 PM on July 23, 2015

I would create a spreadsheet in Google Drive that has the same formatting as a MS Money extract. Extract MS Money to CSV (or whatever), then copy and paste into the Google Spreadsheet. On a second sheet in the Google Spreadsheet, have pre-set formulas that automatically summarize the information that was copied and pasted. Share the spreadsheet (make sure to link directly to the summary page) with your wife. You could include canned graphs if that helps.

I would get more specific than that but I don't know what kind of information is in MS Money or what you're going for - does this put each expenditure into a category? If you need it in categories so you might need a whole 2-D spreadsheet instead of a single line in order to record each expense's category. In that case it might be easier to duplicate the spreadsheet every month so the formulas and structure are preserved, wipe out the old data, and copy-and-paste the new data in.

I do something similar each month with our assets & liabilities - I enter each one into a Google Spreadsheet, and premade formulas in another tab summarize the information about where our money is.
posted by Tehhund at 1:39 PM on July 23, 2015

An off the beaten-path dev-centric solution: github formats csv's into a decently readable table. Create a git repo in github.com (either public or pay for private), export csv from MS Money to the same filename each time, commit and push to github, and give your wife the link to the github formatted version to view.

Bonus - source control on your csv!
posted by cgg at 1:59 PM on July 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Can MS Money export to an Excel spreadsheet? Dropbox now has an online reader for those that works quite well.
posted by flabdablet at 7:02 AM on July 24, 2015 [1 favorite]