Do You Track Your Credit Card Transactions?

   Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all - I hope you had a good one sans pinches!

   Speaking of green, I've been knee-deep in personal finance nonsense all night. Which is mostly good, if tedious.

   Back in college, mortally fearing spending more on my first credit card than I'd be able to pay in full when my statement arrived, I established the habit of tracking every credit card transaction I made. In fact, I'd write each one into my checkbook register, leaving the check number column blank. Then when my end-of-the-month statement arrived I'd make sure my charges matched between the statement and my checkbook register. Finally, I'd write the check number I used to pay the credit card bill into the check number column of each transaction line.

   This worked very well - it was a snap to identify vendor errors (double charges and such) but chewed up a lot of register space and added a bunch of manual labor.

   What I do now is use a web app I developed to essentially do the same thing, except that since it is stored in a database, clearing transactions is a lot easier, as is balancing the checkbook, and as a bonus, it is trivial to slice-and-dice data for analysis in whatever manner I choose.

   So I'm curious..Do you track your credit card transactions? At all? If so, at what granularity? I wonder how many people end up in precarious financial situations because they DON'T do something as simple as my college tracking system..