The mission of ScutumSoft
At ScutumSoft we believe that people need simple tools in personal finances. A roman legionary always had his scutum, a large, rectangle shield which protected him. Today we need protection in money matters. There are a lot of software which can help you, but they cannot be used as easily as a scutum, and they cannot be modified to customize to your needs.
Scutum ledger is an excel file which is designed to keep track of your money movements between your accounts, categorize your spendings and calculate the profit of your investments. In the formulas you can see exactly how the calculation are carried out. Our mission is to explain you the basics of accounting and how it can be implemented in excel. This gives you the power to tailor or extend this ledger. For example, you can easily create custom diagrams in excel.
If you have several thousand transactions, then you may be interested in Ledger commander. Lc helps to edit easier the spending categories, it can execute several useful commands regarding transactions and accounts (e.g., gross up interest), it can download account history, balance, and statement from certain internet banks, Lc can import account history, and it also can compare Lc and bank balances.
How much money do I have?
As long as you have a single account this is an easy question. You just check your balance and that is it. If you have several accounts, credit cards, assets, loans, shares, stocks then it can become tricky. You have to log in to all of your account and sum up the balances. You also have to answer some question. For example, in case of shares do you want the gross or the net value (yes, you have to pay tax for your gains), if you have a ten year old car then what is it its value, do you want to take into account the value of your car at all, what about the value of your expensive smart phone?
Figure: Scrooge McDuck counts his money.
In a cartoon Scrooge McDuck counts his money by swimming in it. As you have seen, keeping track of your finances can be challenging.
How much is the yield of your investments?
Once you know how much money you have, there are other interesting questions to be answered. What are your assets, how their values have changed over time, what is the yield of a particular investment, what percentage of your money is liquid, what is the ratio of your income and expense, etc. One major question is how much the yield of your investments is. This is called the passive income. It shows how much your money works for you. In the long run your aim may be to have larger passive income then your expenses.
How can we help?
Scutum ledger and Ledger commander gives you a workflow to follow. If you do that, then you can answer the aforementioned questions yourself. Every month you export your account histories from your internet bank, import these histories into Lc, specify the category of each income and expense, import the actual prices of your assets, and compare the bank balances with the Lc balances.
Lc can export your data into Scutum ledger. Scutum ledger and Lc perform the same calculations so you can understand what is under the hood. Lc uses a local database which is better to perform complex calculations than Excel. Excel can be slow if you have transactions for several years. Local database means that your financial data never leaves your computer, so there is no confidentiality issue.