How to Do Personal Bookkeeping?
- Patrick Roney
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How to Do Personal Bookkeeping?
June 4, 2025
QuickBooks Tips
Personal bookkeeping is not something you can just do as a hobby; you must know what you are doing! Thankfully for you, this article is here to help you manage your finances, and teach you everything you need to know about bookkeeping. Most people are not taught anything about money, not by their parents, and not in school. And, you become an adult who needs to handle money every day, and you don’t know anything about them. As with anything that you are doing in your life, you need to research the matter before doing anything. Finances are no different. But, don’t worry, because Proledge is here to help with the info you need.
Contents:
Keeping Track
The first step towards accurate personal bookkeeping is to keep track of your expenses. This can work differently for every person; that’s why you must find the option that works best for you. In the beginning, it would be best to just start plain and simple, with just a pen and a piece of paper. Write the month you are in, and start writing everything down. But, most importantly, start with writing down your income, and your biggest expenses (rent, utilities, groceries, etc.). While at this, make sure to gather all of the documents that could relate to your financial situation. At the end of the day, having everything in one place can save you some time and money.
The piece of paper where you log all your data, should have its home in a file. In that file, you can put all your receipts, bank statements, and bills. Having a file where every document for that month is there, can be very helpful when tax season comes around. You have everything logged in, and the proof for all of those logs. This tracking system can also help with identifying bag spending habits. You might be paying a monthly subscription fee for something that you are no longer using. With this process, you can eliminate all of those unnecessary expenses.
A Software
You can always just use a software for personal bookkeeping. You don’t necessarily need something fancy; plain old Google Sheets, Excel, or other similar tools work very well. For most people, this option works way better. You don’t need to figure out where to store months-old documents, and so on. You have everything in one place! You can just create a folder for each month, and have everything there. Remember that you can also take photos or scan your receipts and other physical documents.
Get In Touch With Proledge
You can contact us anytime if you have questions or encounter a problem with your bookkeeping program.
The Categories
There are three main categories into which all of your money can be split. And, those are: income, expenses, and savings. Whether you are doing your personal bookkeeping with the help of paper, or a software, you must be aware of the categories. As you can probably tell, because of the name of the categories, income represents all of the money that are earning in a month. Expenses is the category that shows you all of your money, from that month, is going. And savings represent the money that you are putting aside. It’s not very hard to understand! If you want to read more about these categories, start with this article published by Investopedia!
Every expense should be logged. Start with the bigger ones, and go down until you reach the last and cheaper expense. Even after only two months, you will be able to predict your expenses for the next month. Having some basic understanding when it comes to personal finance management is going to be a great help throughout this whole process. But, you are here to learn! If you want to find out more, you could also read this article, which discusses more about the basic principles of bookkeeping. It’s true that there are many things to learn and to understand, but don’t worry; thanks to the internet, you have access to many materials that can help you improve your personal finance literacy. As for now, you know about the importance of accurately keeping track, and about the three main categories when it comes to your finances.
Is Budgeting Important?
Even if this was already lightly mentioned, the importance of budgeting is far greater than just a subtle reminder. This whole thing starts with planning. You must first identify the reason why you want to do your own bookkeeping. Most people don’t even think about doing it, and hire experts for it. But, why do you want to do it? Maybe you want to better identify your spending habits, because you want to start saving money. It’s true that you always know best on certain matters, but this is a delicate one. You must remember that you can always find professionals who are ready to help you fulfill your goals. If that’s what you need, you can contact us!
Planning Ahead
One of the main purposes of this, is being able to plan ahead. But, this is something that most people don’t think is needed. Think about it, if you have children, you want to make sure that you will be able to pay for college; or just help them navigate through life. After their college, or if you just don’t have children, you might want to plan for retirement. It’s true that you never know what awaits for you in the future; but you can still plan for it, at least a little bit. No one was ever upset that they planned ahead; but many people are upset that they didn’t. If you can do it, just do it.
And, on a funnier note, it’s better to be upset that you did it, than regret that you didn’t. Now, you did your research, and you can continue doing it, by reading this article published by IESE! Another thing you might want to look into is QuickBooks training. And, thankfully, we have an article about that. You might even want to analyze the market, and choose to obtain the best bookkeeping certification!
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