I’ve been in banking for 2.5 years so far.

So, how long have you been in banking?

I also highly recommend using carbon copy checks. How many times have you written a check and forgot who you wrote it to and for how much?

BTW – a merchant has 60 days to submit their tickets to their banks for posting. After 60 days, if they try to post it, you can technically dispute it as a stale-dated item. I don’t see too many waiting that long, though for that very reason. Even still, if your $.50 doesn’t show up for a little while, I wouldn’t be too worried. And like you said, you’ve got it in your register, so it should be alright.

Why did I start keeping a register? One — so I could get a better idea of how/why I’m spending. And two — because I recently started work in the claims dept at a bank, and I take calls ALL DAY LONG from people who have issues with debit/ATM/ACH transactions. It’s not just fraud, but things like double-postings, items posting for the wrong amts, items not posting for months after the intial charge was made, credits not showing up by the time promised, etc.

Luckily, none of this has happened to me (that I know of anyway, because I never kept a register before…). The only thing bugging me now is a 50 cent charge I made with a checkcard at a parking garage, that never showed up. I contacted the garage and they said it could take a few days to post, but it’s been weeks now. But at least I’m aware of it and it’s recorded in my register, so it won’t be a surprise when it does show up.

BTW, I don’t keep a paper register. I keep an Excel budget, which I purchased from the fine folks at YNAB.com . (No I don’t work for them, I just love how organized I feel about my finances since I started keeping that register.)

Since I started working at the claims dept, I tell all my friends, family and customers why it is so important to keep a register. Again, great post!!

My husband and I haven’t been very good about using a cheque register, since most of our transactions are electronic (we write about 10 cheques a year). I have finally started keeping a spreadsheet in which I put all transactions, even if I can’t remember the exact amount (with a note beside it to check the amount). But even with that, I saw a petrol station transaction that I didn’t recognise and it took a 10 minute conversation between me and hubby to finally figure out that he had to get oil & petrol for the lawn mower and didn’t have any cash. It was a relief to figure it out. In all fairness to hubby, he had given me the receipt as soon as he got back but it just didn’t make it from where he handed it to me to my desk so it could be put into the spreadsheet.

In future, we plan to keep up with our spreadsheet cheque register, but we still have to remember to put everything in it.