I tried the little notebook and that was useless for me. I am good at keeping receipts until I ge thome so I was thinking something like quicken. Is it good for everyday stuff- soda, laundry detergent, gum, and reg bills? Is it simple? Any other suggestions?

I use Microsoft Money which I understand works similar to Quicken. It comes with pre-set categories but it is easy to add more. I also use it to track when bills are due. And I can track DH pay with each little thing broke down, I have his 401K as an account and the Xmas club thru company credit union. My financesare much better since I got MM last year. When you enter receipts, you can even "split" it into multiple categories. Just make sure you know the right sales tax to apply to a category. For example, in VA there is no tax on medicines/healthcare so OTC meds get no tax, same as stuff like first aid supplies.

I love Quicken. I make it a habit to turn it on when I get home each evening and put that day's spending into it.
It can do some fairly complicated things, but the basics of just keeping track of bills and spending is easy.
It's nice to set up a budget and get graphs comparing how your actual spending matched your budgets - with red bars overbudget and green under. You can look at it over any period of time you choose. Or without a budget you can just get totals of amounts spent per category so you can really see where your money is going.
You can set it up to remind you when each bill is due, and see at a glance how much you have in each account and balances on credit cards.
I don't think I could live without it anymore.

Quicken is wonderful. I use it to track everything. The budget is wonderful, and it is great to be able to look at the category breakdowns for specific time periods to see where your money is actually going. If you use it diligently it can be very enlightening.

PUT ALL YOU PURCHASE ON ONE or TWO CREDIT CARDS

THE STATEMENT IS AVAILABLE ON-LINE and IN THE US MAIL

My wife and I started tracking our expenses a couple of months ago... George has the answer...

For us:

BofA Check/Debit Card: Bills and purchases
Discover Card: Gas

It is really an easy way for us, because it tracks all purchases and the date... Then I just download the statements..

I pay all my bills online which is much easier for me to track...

The only downside to just using a CC statement is it doesn't tell you what you bought at the store. For ex, we do most our shopping @ WalMart because it is a supercenter. So every week we have groceries, personal care (soap/shampoo/etc), maybe clothing, maybe pet care, automotive maintence items, gift items, etc. If the pharmacy was open 24 hrs, we'd even be getting Rx there.

Using Money allows me to break each receipt down into categories so we can see where we are overspending or even wasting.

For OP, if you want to get a version of Money or Quicken cheap, try looking for last year's version at places like Staples. I use Money 2003 and have no probs with it. I prefer to DL my data myself, that way I know it gets done and I have to access it daily so I know what our balance shows but also what we REALLY have available to spend. Jus tmake sure your SO is on board. When I first started w/Money DH would forget to ask me (or look it up himself) and take money out of the ATM because he thought everything had cleared. I had to do several franctic transfers from savings to checking because savings was off limits for him.

Splashmoney tracks everything on my palm pilot. I can download that to MS Money later. I have to agree with other posters that it really helps to keep all your spending on 1 or 2 cards.