I tried learning SWIFT, but it seems too ahead of me. Perhaps I'll try it again later sometime. Now that I am counting days for my return, I was thing what else could I do to fill time.
Since beginning, the mobile app served the purpose of recording the cash expenses and listed them down for reference. Every end of the month, I'd reconcile these against the cash withdrawals and start off again.
The user challenge was that I had to wait till the end of the month to know how I fared in terms of expenses. I was always one month behind. Though I have great data from all my banks, here in UAE and India and I have a broad understanding of how expenses stack up, I never knew how I was faring in the current month, till the month was over.
The way to fix was 2 fold.
1. I had to record all expenses and not just cash ones and compare them with the target limits I set out against all the budget groups.
2. When recording the expenses I however, had to be careful. I need to segregate the cash expenses as I still needed to reconcile these end of the month. The card expenses are actually throw away ones. They only help with the getting a handle on how I'm doing this month. End of the month the statement files would come out and they will be the single source of truth for posterity. Also, the kind to annotations I could do with these statements would be too much work to do for manual entry. Hence not worth it.
There were 2 other features I wanted.
1. Ability to view my current month expenses against all categories and also against the budget groups.
2. Ability to delete an expense on the mobile itself in case I entered it wrongly. A feature I did not have till now. Strange, coming to thing of it.
Took me 3 days. With my tech challenges sorted out back in dec, I was able to roll these out in just 3 days. Its incredible. If technology supports you, you can achieve incredible productivity.
Showed these to my wife. She likes them... Gratification received.
Since beginning, the mobile app served the purpose of recording the cash expenses and listed them down for reference. Every end of the month, I'd reconcile these against the cash withdrawals and start off again.
The user challenge was that I had to wait till the end of the month to know how I fared in terms of expenses. I was always one month behind. Though I have great data from all my banks, here in UAE and India and I have a broad understanding of how expenses stack up, I never knew how I was faring in the current month, till the month was over.
The way to fix was 2 fold.
1. I had to record all expenses and not just cash ones and compare them with the target limits I set out against all the budget groups.
2. When recording the expenses I however, had to be careful. I need to segregate the cash expenses as I still needed to reconcile these end of the month. The card expenses are actually throw away ones. They only help with the getting a handle on how I'm doing this month. End of the month the statement files would come out and they will be the single source of truth for posterity. Also, the kind to annotations I could do with these statements would be too much work to do for manual entry. Hence not worth it.
There were 2 other features I wanted.
1. Ability to view my current month expenses against all categories and also against the budget groups.
2. Ability to delete an expense on the mobile itself in case I entered it wrongly. A feature I did not have till now. Strange, coming to thing of it.
Took me 3 days. With my tech challenges sorted out back in dec, I was able to roll these out in just 3 days. Its incredible. If technology supports you, you can achieve incredible productivity.
Showed these to my wife. She likes them... Gratification received.
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