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• Posted May 12, 2015, 12:51 p.m. - 8 years, 11 months ago

Keeping track of finances with a PDF editor

 

A lot of us use spreadsheets to keep track of our finances and outgoings, both in the domestic and business environment. The act of writing down amounts and logging them on a sheet helps make the expenditure seem more “real” than perhaps just processing an online payment or setting up a direct debit, and helps keep track of what remains in an account on a monthly/yearly basis.

There are templates to organise a financial spreadsheet readily available either online or through Excel, or of course you can make your own easily. However you choose to lay yours out, it’s important that there are columns for Date, Amount, Payee, Transaction ID and Payment Method. Additional columns such as Recipient (for gifts) and currency exchange may also be useful. This type of info is best laid out as a table with clear headings, and if in a spreadsheet, possibly tabbed per month for ease of use.

All of this can make for what appears on the surface possibly quite a complicated document, and you’ll want to make sure you protect it. Saving the file as a PDF is one such way to do so, because these can be watermarked and password protected to stop unauthorised users accessing and using them without permission.

PDF documents are also a lot easier to print than spreadsheets because the content is all conformed to one page, and they can be shared but without granting others access rights if needed. Once a document is in PDF format, however, it can only be edited via the original source document and then re-saved as a PDF, so it will be important to keep the original safe or make use of a PDF editing program should the original not be available.

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