Alex's Alliterative Adventures

I have two accounts registered with Wesabe: a cash account, and a chequing account. In this post I’ll show you how to track your spending in a cash account.

To start a new cash account, click “Add an Account” on the left side of the site, and then find the tiny “Create a Cash Account” link on the right. Once you’ve chosen an account name and currency, click Create to finish making your new account. (Click on an image to see an enlarged version)

I start by writing down all my cash expenses. Since I have a horrible memory, I usually jot down the details in my cell phone (26/3 – 1.30 – food @ VHS) within a few seconds of the money leaving my hands. I sign in to Wesabe a couple of times per week to update my spending. If you have a twitter account and text message to burn, you can also tweet your spending directly to Wesabe and save yourself some time.

When you want to update your cash spending, click on your cash account and enter your transaction data:

Picking good tags for your transactions allows you to look back later and easily analyze your expenses. Normal tags are applied to every transaction from a merchant (all of my amazon.de transactions are tagged “shopping”), and one time tags can be used to add more detail (textbooks, lunch, birthday, etc).

When you save the transaction, it appears in your account activity:

If you’re tracking your cash account’s balance, you can refresh the page to update your balance:

If you guys are interested in reading more, I’ll show you how to manage your bank account on Wesabe in another post. Your bank account (or credit card) probably provides a more useful picture of your spending, and Wesabe only gets better when you feed it more crunchable numbers.