Budgeting Spreadsheet

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The purpose of a budgeting spreadsheet is to track your business’s, home’s or your personal expenses. The good thing about making your own sheet is that you don’t have to worry about spending money on buying a standalone program or learning a new piece of software. All you need is to be able to make your own sheet using a simple and straightforward program like MS excel or many of its free alternatives. Since everything you need in order to build a sheet is available in a spreadsheet program you just need to be able to arrange your data properly.

In addition to cost effectiveness using a spreadsheet program like excel ensures that your sheet is portable. A sheet made in excel can be read on your laptop, Google reader, palm pilot, iPod, or blackberry device. This essentially allows you to pull up your sheet from anywhere and edit it as you like. Unlike many standalone programs this eliminates the need for a separate internet connection just to work on your sheet.

When planning on making your own budgeting spreadsheet there are various layouts from which to choose from. These layouts may range from the simple and sometimes confusing debt, credit layout to more complicated and categorized layouts that use separate sheets in a workbook to track your loans, credits, bank accounts and expenses separately.

There is no point making your sheet more complex than it needs to be so keeping things simple should be one of your goals. If you don’t need a separate head for each and every category of your budget you should just neatly place everything on one sheet with a running total at the bottom of your sheet that updates automatically.

The planning phase of your budgeting sheet should start with making a list of all the accounts you have, and the various types of expenses. You should list things such as payments, credit card payments, auto loans etc. Depending on the number of heads you want each head can be given a separate column the expenses of which are then summed at below using the ‘add’ function. This can then be further taken out from your monthly or fortnightly income using the ‘subtract’ function in excel.

Now if you are in the process of making your sheet and you have realized that it’s going to be too big to handle on one sheet then it’s time to break it down into separate sheets on the same workbook. A workbook can have anywhere from two to a few hundred sheets so you don’t have to worry about running out of space here. You can also add sheets for investments, returns, and other heads relating to your income and expenses in separate sheets.

Many people may also want a calendar in their spreadsheet which makes tracking when an expense was incurred and when they were paid etc. It can also help with keeping an eye on due dates for bills.

A budgeting spreadsheet is a great way to track and plan your finances without having to spend money on a standalone piece of software for this purpose. All you need is a simple spreadsheet program such as Microsoft excel or any other free alternative. The idea behind using a spreadsheet program is that you don’t have to necessarily know all the formals since many of them are already built into all leading programs. (more…)