Chapter 6: Managing Your Accounts

Comparing your spending with previous time periods

Every time you enter an expense, Money 2006 records the transaction details for so that you can create reports. As time goes on, you might want to compare your current expenses to a time period in the past. Comparison reports can display your spending by payee, expense group, or by overall financial situation for two different time periods.

	Important
	These steps are for the Advanced Reports. To determine whether you are using the Advanced Reports, look in the top right of the Reports home page. You'll see a label indicating Advanced Reports or Essential Reports. If you need to change to Advanced Reports, under Other Tasks, click Change Report Settings, and then click Switch from Essential View to Advanced View.

1. Click Reports.
2. Under Comparison Reports, click Spending by Category Comparison, Spending by Payee Comparison or Income and Spending Comparison to display the report of your choice.

Figure 6-8: Spending by Category Comparison report

	Tip
	These reports can be printed, saved to your hard drive, or e-mailed. For more information, read Export and e-mail your reports in chapter 13.

At the bottom of the screen, you can change the time periods by clicking the down arrows in the Compare and To boxes. You can also restrict which income and expense groups are included in the report by making a selection in the Category box. To make more advanced modifications to the report, click Customize in the left pane.

What's next

Now that you're beginning to use more powerful tools to help manage your finances, the next chapter, Make Money Work Smarter for You focuses on using Money to establish a budget, help reduce your debt, and offer much more than you might expect from a personal financial management software package.

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