Cash Flow

Yesterday I found that the shower was running cold. Aaargh!

The quickest wash ever.

Later I took my car to the repairers for an estimate for the insurance company for the damage to one of my wing mirrors. They are coming a week tomorrow to collect my car and drop off a courtesy car, which will be a small automatic as is mine. There is an excess of £75 to pay.

Now I keep accounts on MS Excel, detailing all my income and expenditure; I also keep separate accounts for my 2 credit cards which give a running total for the month’s expenditure. These totals are fed into the Excel sheet for the dates on which the payments will be deducted as I pay the total amounts each month by direct debit.

The principal advantage of doing this is that I can run the income, expenditure and bank balance ahead as far as I choose, giving me an overview of my cash flow, which allows me to keep my accounts under control. I don’t work to a budget, I work to my income.

I reconcile the bank account and the credit card expenditure more or less on a daily basis and I was starting to get a bit worried about my cash flow over the next couple of months, but was not too surprised as I had had a number of unexpected expenses.

However, on looking again more closely yesterday morning I discovered that I had put a small pension into the expenditure column instead of the income one. Now that I have corrected it, the future looks somewhat rosier! The mistake must have arisen due to doing a “copy and paste” after I had inserted a new column for the cheque numbers.

As The Shrink would put it:

Much goodness.