Personal Banking using accrual method
"You would add your daily earnings every day. For example, you work full time job (8 hours a day) at $20/hour. At the end of the 1st day of the month, you'd add $160 to your salary account. You've earned it, even though its still almost a month till you actually get paid. So its accrued. What if you don't get paid? You've accrued it already, its on your books, but not in your wallet. You might have paid taxes on it, etc. But you don't really have it. This is what is called ""bad debt"", and eventually, after you can show that the payee is not going to pay, you write it off - remove it from your books (and adjust your taxes etc that you paid on that income already). Generally, it is a very bad idea to use accrual method of accounting for an individual or a small business. For large volume business using accrual mode solves other accounting and revenue recognition problems."
"See Publication 505, specifically the section on ""Annualized Income Installment Method"", which says: If you do not receive your income evenly throughout the year (for example, your income from a repair shop you operate is much larger in the summer than it is during the rest of the year), your required estimated tax payment for one or more periods may be less than the amount figured using the regular installment method. The publication includes a worksheet and explanation of how to calculate the estimated tax due for each period when you have unequal income.  If you had no freelance income during a period, you shouldn't owe any estimated tax for that period. However, the process for calculating the estimated tax using this method is a good bit more complex and confusing than using the ""short"" method (in which you just estimate how much tax you will owe for the year and divide it into four equal pieces).  Therefore, in future years you might want to still use the equal-payments method if you can swing it.  (It's too late for this year since you missed the April deadline for the first payment.)  If you can estimate the total amount of freelance income you'll receive (even though you might not be able to estimate when you'll receive it), you can probably still use the simpler method.  If you really have no idea how much money you'll make over the year, you could either use the more complex computation, or you could use a very high estimate to ensure you pay enough tax, and you'll get a refund if you pay too much." I'm a CPA and former IRS agent and manager. Whether you are a cash or accrual basis taxpayer, you get to deduct the expense when your card is charged. Think of it this way: You are borrowing from the credit card company or bank that issued the credit card. You take that money to make a purchase of a product or service. You now have an expense and a liability to a third party. When you pay off the liability, you do not get to take a deduction. Your deduction is when you pay for the expense. Depending on what you purchased, you may have to capitalize it. As asked previous in the week, there is a big difference between budgeting and expense tracking.  Using software, like GNUCash, allows one to track their spending.   A budget is a plan, the tracking is what actually happened. I do not track expenses, although I do budget.  For me, hitting financial goals is good enough of a track, without investing the time and energy into tracking every penny.  One could easily criticize my method, as how can you have a good plan without continuous feedback? For me it is an example of the 80/20 principle.  If I put in 20% effort into making and sticking to a budget, I will obtain 80% of the financial success that a person who devotes 100% effort into budgeting and tracking.  A person with the same income and life events, who budgets and tracks, will likely be more successful that I, however, not overwhelmingly so.  For me time is better spent on other endeavors.  You seem to have this attitude as well, but those that do track have it as part of their path to financial success and probably view us as somewhat foolish.    This is another example how personal finance is more about behavior than math. Your assets are marked to market. If you buy at X, and the market is bidding at 99.9% * X then you've already lost 0.1%. This is a market value oriented way of looking at costs. You could always value your assets with mark to model, and maybe you do, but no one else will.  Just because you think the stock is worth 2*X doesn't mean the rest of the world agrees, evidenced by the bid.  You surely won't get any margin loans based upon mark to model.  Your bankers won't be convinced of the valuation of your assets based upon mark to model. By strictly a market value oriented way of valuing assets, there is a bid/ask cost. more clarification Relative to littleadv, this is actually a good exposition between the differences between cash and accrual accounting. littleadv is focusing completely on the cash cost of the asset at the time of transaction and saying that there is no bid/ask cost.  Through the lens of cash accounting, that is 100% correct. However, if one uses accrual accounting marking assets to market (as we all do with marketable assets like stocks, bonds, options, etc), there may be a bid/ask cost.  At the time of transaction, the bids used to trade (one's own) are exhausted.  According to exchange rules that are now practically uniform: the highest bid is given priority, and if two bids are bidding the exact same highest price then the oldest bid is given priority; therefore the oldest highest bid has been exhausted and removed at trade. At the time of transaction, the value of the asset cannot be one's own bid but the highest oldest bid leftover.  If that highest oldest bid is lower than the price paid (even with liquid stocks this is usually the case) then one has accrued a bid/ask cost. "Hi all, just doing some homework which is evaluating a soccer clubs accounts using ratios. We have to include a paragraph on suggesting ""non financial appraisal"" for the soccer club. Anyone any idea what this could mean? Thanks" "There are some banks that offer ""pot"" accounts like this (off the top of my head I think Intelligent Finance does, although they call them ""jars"").  The other option for charity specifically would be a CAF account:  https://www.cafonline.org/my-personal-giving/plan-your-giving/individual-charity-account.aspx" Good question, very well asked! The key here is that you need to find a solution that works for you two without an overt amount of effort.  So in a sense it is somewhat behavior driven, but it is also technology driven.   My wife and I use spreadsheets for both checking account management and budgeting.  A key time saver is that we have a template sheet that gets copied and pasted, then modified for the current month.  Typically 90% of the stuff is the same and each month requires very little modification.  This is one of my problems with EveryDollar.  I have to enter everything each and every month. We also have separate checking accounts and responsibility for different areas of the family expenses.  Doing this risks that we act as roommates, but we both clearly understand the money in one persons account equally belongs to the other and during hard times had to make up for shortfalls on the part of the other. Also we use cash for groceries, eating out, and other day to day expenses.  So we don't have a great need to track expenses or enter transactions. That is what works for us, and it takes us very little time to manage our money.  The budget meeting normally lasts less than a half hour and that includes goal tracking. We kind of live by the 80/20 principle.  We don't see a value in tracking where every dime went.  We see more value in setting and meeting larger financial goals like contributing X amount to retirement and things of that nature.  If we overspent a bit at Walgreens who cares provided the larger goals are meant and we do not incur debt. I can't speak to Tangerine's system specifically, but I have used similar systems through Bank of America and Chase (both US-based).  It sounds like my experience in terms of identity verification were very similar, and I now use this to pay several contractors on a regular basis. No problems so far.