[mbhunter]

Oh good -- I'm glad you saw this post Jesse -- I thought of your budgeting software when I saw the Excel part.

Your point about writing your own transactions down is an excellent one. I recall hearing Donald Trump talk about how he liked to write as many of his checks for his businesses as possible so that he saw where the money was going.

After one's budget is on track, though, and just needs "fine-tuning" it's nice to have some help, especially if there are a lot of transactions to pile through. We download ours, but we also check them and categorize them (Quicken gets the category right some of the time, but not all of the time). That way we still get some of the benefit of actively look at the transactions, because it is very easy to get lazy with the automatic downloads.