The most Lethargic Process

If I'm going to turn my life Agile I'm going to have to do something about those processes in my life that are the very opposite of Agile. You know the ones I mean... the things you do where you find yourself saying "Why am I doing this? There must be an easier way!!". These are my Lethargic Processes.

The king of Lethargic Processes is the Dreaded Tax Return.

The Dreaded Tax Return is the cross I bear for being a detail-oriented control freak.

It all started way back in 1999. I wanted some way of collecting all the information needed for the tax return in one place. We discovered Microsoft Money. Not only would this allow us to print out a report for the tax return, it would also keep detailed information about every transaction in every bank account. We could use it to reconcile our credit card transactions to make sure they were all legitimate. We could print out graphs and reports, and analyse our spending. We could even use it for budgeting! Cool!!

For 12 years we religiously kept every receipt. When we had time, we typed the data into Money. At the end of the financial year we discovered we were way behind in entering receipts. We would spend many hours working through the backlog. Then many more hours reconciling the transactions with the paper statements from the 18(!) accounts we've ended up with. We would hold discussions about what this transaction could possibly be. Eventually, we would have sufficient information to enter the totals of the tax-relevant categories into the tax return.

We may have occasionally extracted some data when applying for a loan. Once, we discovered we had left a $50 note behind at the pharmacy (and managed to retrieve it!)

Was all that effort worthwhile? You be the judge!

This is all rather embarrassing. Clearly, I'm going to have to practice being less patient and more lazy.

Last week I thought I had found a Better Way. I discovered Yodlee Money Center. YMC talks to your banks online and brings all the transactions across for you. It makes a pretty good guess at categorising each transaction, and allows you to set up your own rules for better categorisation. It allows you to mark transactions as tax deductible and extract those into a report. It produces graphs of your spending you can drill down through. And it's free! Sounds good, doesn't it!

Then today I decided to use it to produce a budget for my new lifestyle. Will I be able to afford decent accommodation in Sydney while still maintaining a household in Canberra? That's when I started discovering the short-comings.

I have one bank login that gives me access to a business account as well as my personal account.  The business account is irrelevant to my household budget and mucks up all the figures. I can delete the account - but it comes back again every time YMC refreshes the account information.

You can set up subcategories - but you can't enter a budget for any category containing subcategories.

You can produce transaction listings - but not summaries showing the total for each category.

And worst of all - our main household credit card had to be cancelled due to suspected fraud.  For a while, Yodlee displayed the account with an error saying it could not communicate with the bank.  Then it disappeared altogether taking all the historical transaction data with it!

It does lots of things really well but these shortcomings are close to being show-stoppers. To do my budget I had to resort to extracting old data from Money and typing it into a spreadsheet! I will say though, they do have really responsive online support and they're looking into these issues.

So what to do now?  Use YMC and work around the short-comings? Revert to Money? Or look around for something else?

How do normal people do these things?