Poor Man's Checkbook Program
For some years I have been doing online bill paying from my Macintosh.
At first I used CheckFree which gave me
a version of Quicken and a plugin for CheckFree,
at a cost of $9.95 per month.
Then Chevy Chase Bank offered the same service for $5.95 per month,
using a custom binary.
Both these services were pre-Web and used a private dial-in line.
This summer Chevy Chase Bank discontinued the private dial-in line
and said to use their web-based bill payment.
I had much trouble with Netscape 4.72 but
since I bought the Titanium and downloaded Netscape 6
the bill payment stuff has been working pretty well.
And they are not (currently) charging me anything.
SO, the only functionality lost is the local checkbook tracking
that Quicken and the CCB program used to do.
My response was to write this
Bourne shell script
which keeps a checkbook record in a register.txt file.
Start out with an empty file touch register.txt then
enter a deposit with the current checkbook balance:
dep 1234.56 Starting Balance
The basic transactions are dep to deposit money
and pay to record outgoing money. Some other
transactions include clear to mark a transaction
as being acknowledged on a bank statement, tax to
mark a payment for special tax treatment, and undo
to undo the last transaction entered.
Of course, you can always edit the register.txt file.
Reconciliation
Call the script with a money amount as a command line argument.
An additional field is printed with the discrepancy between the
command line argument and the final balance.
Then mark transactions as cleared, or add transactions,
until the discrepancy is zeroed.
Year-end Processing
The transactions are kept in the file sorted by date,
so sometime in January (when all the December items have been cleared)
split the previous year to a separate file and add a new starting balance.
Calling the script with -tax filename causes
the items marked for special tax treatment to be printed.
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