I wish I could blame my reticence for bookkeeping on “grief brain” but truth be told, I’ve never been good at record keeping. I have all the modern conveniences at my disposal…laptop, smartphone, iPad, Quicken, Turbo Tax…but do you think I can balance my checkbook every month? Categorize every transaction for tax reports? Keep important papers gathered in one place and filed in some semblance of order? No. That’s someone else you’re thinking of. If I did that, what would I have to write about at this time of year, right?

I’ve been at the farm the last couple of weeks. Writing deadlines, copying blog posts over, sorting papers, and balancing my checkbook so I can do my taxes. Monday morning, I started on the computer. It’s a new laptop so I needed to download Quicken. I went into Quicken online and there was 2015’s version ready to download. I thought I’d bought a newer version, but figured I must be mistaken. Download 2015. It didn’t recognize my old data file. Hmmmm. Ok, download data from bank. It gave me three months. I needed all of 2017. Call the bank help line. They talked me through downloading manually. Everything was duplicated. I deleted and reinstalled the program three times. The three months was fine. But anything older was wacky.

Yesterday, I chatted online with Quicken’s service department. They discovered that indeed I had purchased 2017 last year. It just wasn’t showing up. He put it in my shopping cart for me and talked me through the install and now I have all of my bank transactions clear back to 2001! Wahoo! I categorized last year’s transactions so I could run a spending report for taxes. And I reconciled my account…to the penny. If I would just keep up with this on a monthly basis, I wouldn’t have to go through this year after year. Maybe next year I can do better…who knows? In the meantime, today I do my taxes. If you hear of an earthquake in WV today, please disregard. It’s just me. ❤

“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.”
‭‭Ephesians‬ ‭5:15-17‬ ‭NIV‬‬