RV Expense Tracking using Excel

[Pete Masterson]

At 3:00 AM +0000 1/22/06, Marv & Jean Wheeler wrote:
>Is anyone on the forum using an Excel program to track their travel
>expenses and RV expenses? I have all the data entered and I don't
>guess I am smart enought to make the software massage the data.
>
>If you are using something of this sort I would like to know what you
>are using would you recommend it to someone else.
>
>Thanks
>Marv
>2004 M380
>Ocean Shores, WA
>

I use Quicken to track expenses for my small business. No reason it
couldn't be used for tracking expenses for travel and RV. It's simply
a matter of creating suitable expense categories, e.g. fuel, service,
campground fees, food, etc, --- and then entering the data.

Whenever you want to see what you've spent, you can go to the
"reports" section and select the time period and generate an
"income/expense" or "cash flow" statement.

As for Excel, you would need to sort the entries based on some kind
of expense categories --- e.g. fuel, service, campground fees, food,
etc. Hopefully, you included that information as a separate column
for each entry.

Select all of the columns and all of the rows where you have data.
Use the sort command on the category column (and, assuming you've
also entered dates for each entry) also do a secondary sort on the
date. (You'll will have those choices in the sort dialog.)

Once the spreadsheet is sorted, insert a blank row (or two) between
each category (that should all be grouped together after the sort)
and then use the sum function to total up the category.

It's a bit more work (than Quicken) but a spreadsheet can be an
effective way to track expenses.

--
Pete Masterson -- pete@...
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