Over a year ago, I wrote that I had requested a CD-ROM program from T. Rowe Price named “Family Records Organizer”. The concept seemed like a good one: an application to help you organize information on your financial accounts and affairs for your loved ones to refer to if something should ever happen to you.
Well, I finally got around to using the application, and unfortunately I have to give it a thumbs down. While the concept is good, the actual entry of information was just a bit too cumbersome. I was equally unimpressed with the report function, which caused the program to freeze twice and once I finally got it run successfully put the information in a ridiculously non-intuitive format. The report listed out the providers in the beginning of each section, and then listed the account detail afterwards. The provider was not identified in the detail, so you had to refer back to the provider listing to determine what provider went with which account. There were a few other quirks I didn’t care for, such as only having a phone number field on the provider page and not on the individual account page. Especially with credit cards, you can often have different customer service numbers for accounts with the same provider.
After experimenting with this, I decided to go back to an old reliable Excel spreadsheet. I arranged by spreadsheet with the following columns, with one account listed on each row:
- Account type (Checking, Savings, Brokerage, Insurance, etc.)
- Provider (with provider name hyperlinked to their website)
- Account name (to distinguish multiple accounts with the same provider)
- Account number
- Account owner
- Username
- Password
- Phone number
- Notes (use for misc info like security challenge questions, etc.)
- Last updated
I’m find this a lot easier to work with since all the information is on one page and I can easily see what pieces of information are missing. I’ll probably add a second tab to the workbook to do a home inventory listing, but seeing that it took me a year to get around to the account listing exercise that is probably a good ways down the road.
