Using GnuCash has been a real joy over the past two weeks. I'm now very comfortable with my money because I know to the penny where the money comes from and goes to. Plus, exact bookkeeping will let me more carefully budget how I want to spend what money isn't being spent on bare necessities.

In addition to easy reconciliation and budgeting, however, I'm seeing areas where I need to improve my habits when buying. In particular, I'm seeing discrepancies on my receipts that should have been caught while I was standing at the register. For instance, Chipotle charged me for two drinks instead of one last week. And Burger King charged me an anomalous $0.44 more than the total on the register receipt when they ran my card.

Two weeks is clearly not a baseline, so I look forward to seeing trends emerge in the coming months. In the meantime, I'll work on changing my routines at the register so Jewel's self checkout machine can't short me a dollar and penny in change ever again.