For those who have the popular Quicken program for their household finances, you can easily use this program to keep track of your school hours if you need to do this in each individual subject. You will create a new Quicken file for each child's school hours and choose a cash account. Your description will be, "School hours." Then delete out all of the program's preset categories and set up your own. Each subject will be a category. This works very nicely for highschoolers as you can also give a course number. You will indicate these are for income so the register will add your hours together.

After setting up your categories, you enter each week's hours in the register just like in a checkbook. The date enters automatically. You won't have a number in the place where a check number would go. In the next space you enter what your child did, 'Spelling'. Next you will enter the weekly hours in that area, '2'. A half hour would be entered as '.5', 15 minutes as '.25', etc. Last you will be asked which category this activity is related to. The program will cue you as to what your choices are for the category. These are the categories that you have already set up. If you have more than one activity which is under the same subject (category) you are able to do this also. For example in English III, you may have grammar activities, reading and writing activities. In your cash register, you would enter, 'Letter Writing', the number of hours, and then English III for the category. The program will automatically keep a running total of your child's school hours as you complete each entry.

At any time you can have the program create a report which will immediately tell you what the activities were in each category for the time frame you specify and the total number of hours in each subject. This is done by choosing 'reports' from the pull down menu, then clicking home, and itemized categories. Fill in the dates and then click create. I use this each week to figure out the weekly hours for my high schooler and then fill them into her assignment sheet. Each nine weeks I also print a report of the itemized categories for that quarter as a permanent record.

At the end of each school year, you can clear each 'transaction' and archive the school year's worth of records. The program prompts you with what to do when you are ready for this.

I have actually enjoyed setting up this style of school hours record keeping. I use it for our high schooler since it is a perfect way to track and generate the information needed for a high school transcript. Some states require this kind of hours tracking in subjects for all school age children. Quicken makes it easy to enter the information each week. Then the program does all the compiling and calculating work when you need it.