How to track joint finances?

September 28, 2007 9:11 PM

How can I and the soon-to-be-Mrs. start tracking our joint finances simultaneously on separate computers?

She uses a laptop, I have a desktop and a laptop. I know we can just use Quicken on the desktop, but that would take some serious habit-reshaping, and we have enough of that coming up as it is.

Is there any sort of distributed-Quicken thing out there where we can track our finances separately, but end up with one file at the end of the year (which we can both modify along the way)? Maybe online? Network our computers?

posted by gottabefunky to Work & Money (9 answers total)

Response by poster: I should add that we're both freelancers, so we have lots of bits of paper to track.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:12 PM on September 28, 2007

Would Mint work for you?
posted by cmgonzalez at 9:38 PM on September 28, 2007

Moneytrackin is an online finance manager (like Mint?)- I think there's also Wesabe, although I don't know much about that, and if you looked around for online finance tracking stuff you'll probably find a bunch.
posted by jacalata at 10:59 PM on September 28, 2007

What are you using now? Anything? I'm just using a Calc (openoffice.org) spreadsheet. If you wanted to use something like that, then you could just share it via windows file sharing (if you are on windows, but you can use samba otherwise).

Also, I thought that my parents used some sort of quicken online program. There is a quicken online, but I'm not sure that it's what you're looking for, or that it's what my parents are using.

I haven't looked in to it, but you might be able to share the database file (just like the Calc spreadsheet) of regular desktop quicken. This option has the least likelihood of working.
posted by philomathoholic at 11:49 PM on September 28, 2007

From searching the archives, I've found wesabe which mathowie has blogged about.

Oh, and Google has on online spreadsheet too. Apparently, it's still in beta and I haven't tried it, but I've heard other people that have been happy with Google Docs.
posted by philomathoholic at 12:03 AM on September 29, 2007

I use a shared google calendar w/ my SO to coordinate paying bills.
posted by zennoshinjou at 5:00 AM on September 29, 2007

Microsoft Money has an web-access component that says it will let you share your Money file with a partner or spouse.

(No personal experience with this version. I tried the web-access thing in a previous version for a while. Nothing bad happened. Haven't tried Quicken in close to ten years. Maybe they have something similar?)
posted by sageleaf at 9:53 AM on September 29, 2007

My budget's on Google spreadsheets. Multiple people can edit the same spreadsheet at the same time. It's neat.
posted by Dec One at 9:58 AM on September 29, 2007

Wesabe and Mint are both good choices. What type of computer are you using? If my wife and I wanted to do something like this, we'd use Quicken and work from a data file stored on a .Mac account. (Meaning: the datafile would reside online someplace, and either of us could access it.)
posted by jdroth at 4:21 PM on September 29, 2007