I've been setting up a spread sheet to track my spending as per Your Money or Your Life exercises.

I was mostly satisfied with the GUI of wesabe but then they shut down. And I couldn't get the virtual machine / open source wesabe program to work. I think my comp is too much of a dinosaur to efficiently operate a program in a v-box. I gave other websites and programs a test drive: mint, buxfer, msmoney, gnucash, other's I can't remember. There was always something about whatever one I tried that I didn't like.

Eventually I decided to set up my own spread sheet. December will be my first month using it. I'm still putting some finishing touches on it. It's been kind of hard to create it from top down. Eventually when I am entering data I find there is a facet to my spending that I haven't yet represented in my categories, and then I have to adjust lists and re-apply them to the sheets ... and what not. Also I like to play with design and can format things for hours.

Have you authored your own tracking system? Do you have it up as a template on google docs or something?

I'd like to see some other examples before I decide to call mine finished. I'm hoping to have a Master Template of mine by January 01, 2011.