Credit card companies now provide year in summary reports of your expenses. They summarize the twelve statements from last year into categories like gas, grocery, and entertainment so that you can deduct expenses when tax time comes. It’s convenient to go down a sorted list and determine how often you bought things at certain places.

No tallying the receipts of the 52 fillups you had last year. They give you a grand total. You think, wow, that’s a lot of money being burned up driving! Perhaps transit is cheaper. It also helps you plan for the next year’s budget. As gas prices continue to rise, you have an estimate of what it’s going to cost you this year.

If they provide you an electronic version of the summary, you can open it in Excel and play with the data. Graph the amounts of each grocery visit by week or month. How often did you buy something from a certain place? You can’t tell what you bought exactly, but they provide the grand total of each visit to the store.

Buy coffee every weekday? You can see the increase in prices, or how often you order the differently priced cups of the varying types of coffee your mood decides when you step up to the register.

One of the interesting side notes on one of the summaries I received: the year end summary cannot be used to dispute a charge. You must dispute a charge within 60 days of the closing date of the statement which the charge originally appeared. It’s in the fine print.