What is a good way to keep track of your credit card transactions, to reduce likelihood of fraud?
The best way is to retain the charge slips. After you are done for the month you can discard them.   Alternatively if you are using any of the personal finance tool or a simple XLS to track exepnses, it would be easy to figure out what you actually spent and what was not yours. Sign up for alerts.  Everytime you use your card, you'll get an alert.  That way if there is an unauthorized transaction, you'll know right away. The alerts can also tell you what amount was charged - since this happens right away, the last last cc transaction is fresh in your memory and any overcharges can be easily detected. Has saved me more times than I can remember! "There are some tools that might help you. For example, I have an ""Expense It"" application on my iPhone, where I can type in a purchase while still at the cashier, the idea is to track expenses on a trip, but the implementation will suit your needs perfectly. Keeping slips is a way to go too, but I personally don't like that because I'm a messy person and after a couple of days all the receipts are gone. If you can keep track of tons of slips - you can just do that." "One trick is to make all purchases end in a particular number of your choosing, say ""3"". From now on, all restaurant meals,gas purchases, and anything in your control, end them in 3. When you glance at the bill, you can skip these charges, and look carefully at the rest. It's not 100%, as you couldn't easily impact supermarket charges and many others, but it's half of my routine charges." Read your bill, question things that don't look familiar. People who steal credit card numbers don't bother to conceal themselves well. So if you live in Florida, and all of the sudden charges appear in Idaho, you should investigate. Keeping charge slips seems counter-productive to me. I already know that I bought gasoline from the station down the street, a slip of paper whose date may or may not align with the credit card bill is not very useful. The half-life for a stolen card is hours. So you tend to see a bunch of charges appearing quickly. If someone is stealing $20 a week from you over an extended period of time, the theif is probably someone you live or work with, and paper slips won't help you there either.
Some already mentioned that you could pay with your savings and use the credit card as an emergency buffer. However, if you think there is a reasonable chance that your creditcard gets revoked and that you need cash quickly, here is a simple alternative: It is probably safe to throw away the receipt.  Without a system to process and store receipts, they are of little use. With regards to personal finances I'm guilty of preaching without practicing 100% of the time, but here are some arguments for keeping receipts. To reconcile your statement to receipts before paying the credit card bill  - people make mistakes all the time.  I bet if you have an average volume of transactions, you will find at least one mistake in 12 months. To establish baseline spending and calculate a realistic budget.  So many people will draft  a budget by 'estimating' where their money goes.  When it comes to this chore, I think people are about as honest with themselves as exercise and counting calories.  Receipts are facts. To abide by record keeping requirements for warranty, business, IRS, etc... Personally, the only thing I've caught so far is Bank of America charging me interest when I pay my bill in full every month! You can take a shortcut and make a few cumulative transactions, maybe just estimate how much of your spending landed in each of your budget categories, but you will lose a lot of the value that you were building for yourself by tracking your spending during the earlier months. I reconcile my budget and categorize my spending on a monthly basis. It's always a chore to pull out the big stack of receipts and plow through them, but I've learned the value of having an accurate picture of where all my money went. There is no clean way to fake it. You can either take the time and reconcile your spending, or you can take a short cut. It probably renders your efforts to track everything from the beginning of the year invalid though. If you want to start over this month (as you did at the beginning of the year) that would probably be a cleaner way to reconcile things. Credit card fraud is an extremely (to stress, EXTREMELY) small proportion of total credit card transactions.  The card issuing entities all offer zero fraud liability, even on debit cards.  There are millions of transactions every day and fraud loss just isn't worth developing, and supporting, an additional authentication layer that faces the consumer. To be clear, the downside is cost.  Cost to develop, cost to implement, cost to maintain, cost to support.  All of this to stop something that millions of people have yet to even experience. The answer: don't use your actual card number. Some banks offer virtual credit card numbers (services like Apple Pay are functionally the same). Bank of America's virtual cards work like this: The virtual card number is different from your actual card number, so the merchant never sees your real card number. In fact, the merchant cannot even tell that you are using a virtual card. You can set the maximum amount to be charged. You can set the expiration date from 2 to 12 months. Once the merchant has made a charge on that virtual card, only THAT MERCHANT can make any further charges on that same virtual card. It is not possible to discover the real card number from the virtual card number. So the result is that your risk is reduced to the merchant not delivering the order, or charging too much (but not over the limit you set). There is nothing to be stolen since your real info never goes over the internet, and once a merchant has used the virtual card once, no other merchant can use it. Other banks may have virtual cards which have fewer features. The only DISadvantage of this is that you have to go to the bank's website whenever you want to make a purchase from a new merchant. But you don't have to worry about them stealing your real credit card information. ACH, Paypal, Amazon Pay are all other options that can be used.  ACH is cheapest for the merchant but it is a bit of a pain for the customer to setup (aka adds friction to our sales process, which is *very* bad).  Paypal and Amazon Pay both cost a bit more than regular credit cards for the merchant.  Google Wallet is free but not available unless you are a sole proprietor or an individual, which is is useless for businesses.  So yeah, other options are either difficult or more expensive. Contrary to what many people think, credit card companies pass nearly all fraud costs via purchased goods onto the merchant who sells them. As a result, they stand a very high chance of getting the money from a fraudulent purchase of a specific purchased item back, as they just chargeback the merchant who has to stomach the cost. This is not the case for cash transactions obviously, where as soon as the money leaves the ATM fraudulently it is as good as gone. As a result, the risk profile of the two types of transaction is wildly different, and the credit limits of each reflect this. I use Banktivity.  It's very much not free, but it automatically downloads all my bank and credit card activity and has excellent reporting options. My wife and I have a different arrangement.  I like to track everything down to the transaction level.  She doesn't want everything tracked.  We have everything joint and I track everything except she has one credit card where I do not see the statements only the total.  She is more comfortable, because she can buy things without me seeing the price for individual transactions. Sap just developed a fraud detection module for their ERP suite in conjuction with EY. It offers live fraud scanning so you can stop a flagged transaction before a transfer is carried out.  I saw a presentation an it looks pretty powerfull although it is only in the early stages. While Rocky's answer is correct in the big picture there is another factor here to keep in mind: The disruption while you're waiting to resolve it. If a fraudster gets your card and drains your account you'll get your money back--but there will be a period while they are investigating that it won't be available. For this reason I avoid debit card transactions and only use credit cards.  If the fraudster gets your credit card you might lose access while they investigate but you don't lose access to your bank account. If your checking account has a card associated with it, then keeping funds in savings reduces the risk that some kind of fraud will wipe you out. My view is from the Netherlands, a EU country. Con: Credit cards are more risky. If someone finds your card, they can use it for online purchases without knowing any PIN, just by entering the card number, expiration date, and security code on the back. Worse, sometimes that information is stored in databases, and those get stolen by hackers! Also, you can have agreed to do periodic payments on some website and forgot about them, stopped using the service, and be surprised about the charge later. Debit cards usually need some kind of device that requires your PIN to do online payments (the ones I have in the Netherlands do, anyway), and automated periodic payments are authorized at your bank where you can get an overview of the currently active ones. Con: Banks get a percentage of each credit card payment. Unlike debit cards where companies usually pay a tiny fixed fee for each transaction (of, say, half a cent), credit card payments usually cost them a percentage and it comes to much more, a significant part of the profit margin. I feel this is just wrong. Con: automatic monthly payment can come at an unexpected moment With debit cards, the amount is withdrawn immediately and if the money isn't there, you get an error message allowing you to pay some other way (credit card after all, other bank account, cash, etc). When a recent monthly payment from my credit card was due to be charged from my bank account recently, someone else had been paid from it earlier that day and the money wasn't there. So I had to pay interest, on something I bought weeks ago... Pro: Credit cards apparently have some kind of insurance. I've never used this and don't know how it works, but apparently you can get your money back easily after fraudulent charges. Pro: Credit cards can be more easily used internationally for online purchases I don't know how it is with Visa or MC-issued debit cards, but many US sites accept only cards that have number/expiration date/security code and thus my normal bank account debit card isn't useable. Conclusion: definitely have one, but only use it when absolutely necessary. "Other responses have focused on getting you software to use, but I'd like to attempt your literal question: how are such transactions managed in systems that handle them? I will answer for ""double entry"" bookkeeping software such as Quicken or GnuCash (my choice). (Disclaimer: I Am Not An Accountant and accountants will probably find error in my terminology.) Your credit card is a liability to you, and is tracked using a liability account (as opposed to an asset account, such as your bank accounts or cash in your pocket). A liability account is just like an asset except that it is subtracted from rather than added to your total assets (or, from another perspective, its balance is normally negative; the mathematics works out identically). When you make a purchase using your credit card, the transaction you record transfers money from the liability account (increasing the liability) to the expense account for your classification of the expense. When you make a payment on your credit card, the transaction you record transfers money from your checking account (for example) to the credit card account, reducing the liability. Whatever software you choose for tracking your money, I strongly recommend choosing something that is sufficiently powerful to handle representing this as I have described (transfers between accounts as the normal mode of operation, not simply lone increases/decreases of asset accounts)." Mint.com does a pretty good job at this, for a free service, but it's mostly for personal finance. It looks at all of your transactions and tries to categorize them, and also allows you to create your own categories and filters. For example, when I started using it, it imported the last three months of my transactions and detected all of my 'coffee house' transactions. This is how I learned that I was spending about $90 a month going to Starbucks, rather than the $30 I had estimated.  I know it's not a 'system' like an accounting outfit might use, but most accounting offices I've worked with have had their own home-brewed system.