I prefer keeping my finances simple, so I made an Excel sheet to track monthly costs and review them in a single summary dashboard.
No syncing, no accounts, just manual entry and a clear overview. Posting here in case anyone else prefers spreadsheets over apps.
A simple Excel sheet I use to track monthly expenses without budgeting apps
byu/Majestic_Plastic_854 inpersonalfinance
Posted by Majestic_Plastic_854
9 Comments
This is actually genius – I’ve tried like 5 different budgeting apps and they all end up being more complicated than helpful. Manual entry forces you to actually look at what you’re spending too instead of just letting it auto-categorize everything
Spreadsheets over apps any day although I’m not very good at making them. A goal of mine for 2026 is to up my spreadsheet game, actually get good at formulas and charts rather than just data
My sheet is tabs are years, rows are each day of the year, columns are categories. Under the rows are sums of each category. Simple.
I made a thing that I’ve used myself for about 10 years. I occasionally think of trying it polish it and make money from it because I find it so useful but don’t really know where to start.
If anyone fancies a look it’s here. Basically you stuff all your repeating bills spending and income into it and your balance and you can really see how much you’ll have projected into the future if you stick on budget. If you drift you can “rebalance” – ie update your actual account.
I suspect things like it must already exist.
https://pedallingtoparis.com/calendarbudget/
I do this as well. I used Mint for awhile and when that went away I just started rolling my own Google sheet. One sheet per year with tabs for accounts and each month’s budget. I also have a master sheet that tracks the years together.
I work from home so it’s easy to manually enter transactions each morning and I find having to do that means I always know where we are.
I’ve worked on it for years adding features as I think of them and it works well for me.
Did you post it anywhere for people to see or just describing what you do?
Link?
Same. I have about 15 custom categories I’ve created, and list all of my accounts. Then I use a ton of ‘Sum If’ and ‘Count If’ formulas to help categorize and keep running totals that reconcile with my accounts. I have budgetary burn rates, credit utilization ratios, due dates… Tons of helpful info. No app needed!
I’ve been doing this for years now, upgrading my analytics every few months or so. I have a sheet per month for tracking expenses, broken into recurring and one-off expenses. Then another sheet for dashboarding a bunch of reports using those data – high, low, and average balance by month, category comps and trends (e.g. did grocery spend increase or decrease MoM or YoY), ratio of expected expenses vs. one-offs, etc.
It’s my baby and I dream of productizing it one day, once I bother to teach myself some python or something.
Tl:dr – I didn’t get to see your spreadsheet, but I applaud the idea and wanted to brag about my version 😅