My Dad’s always telling me that I should keep track of exactly how much I’m spending, that I would probably be really surprised to see where my money’s going at the end of every month … It’s not a bad idea and I KNOW I need to watch my money a lot closer than I do at the moment, especially as things are starting to get reeeeeally tight!

The trouble is, I *always* forget to record my personal expenses – I’ve tried to remember to make a note every time I spend money, but somehow I just never get there! The business is another story – I am meticulous about recording where every cent goes, but my personal finances are chaotic, to say the least. I lose track of stuff like how much I spend on groceries and pocket money dished out in dribs and drabs to the kids. I have endless receipts and little pieces of paper floating all over the place and it’s a nightmare!

Thanks to one of my Twitter contacts, geekrebel, I have now found an EXCELLENT way of keeping track of my personal day to day expenses =)

Xpenser

“Fire and Forget Expense Tracking. Record Your Expenses as soon as you incur them, using Xpenser.

We were fed up with how painful expense reports and tracking were. After many experiments we found a workable solution: record expenses as soon as they happen and forget about them.

Xpenser lets you do just that – record expenses via whatever means are available to you quickly and painlessly. Send them in via Email, SMS, IM, or voice … Use the Web interface to edit and finalize them or export them to your favorite financial management software. No more forgetting your cash expenses, no more half-day expense entry sessions.”

I’ve set up Xpenser to work with my Twitter account so I can DM (Direct Message) my expenses to the service from my mobile while I’m out and about.

I’ve also tested out the email option and that works perfectly too (no more scraps of paper to keep track of YAY!).

If I had an IM service like Google Talk or MSN, I could use that as well.

I can insert keywords with each expense and then log in to the website to generate expense reports using the keywords I select, e.g. petrol or food or pocket money, and export the reports for various applications, including Excel.

Pretty nifty hey? I think it’s a winner =)