In fact, because I like to overthink things (and this guy asked), I’m making the template “open source”. However, I get the sense that a lot of people are at least interested in the idea of getting some insight into their spending patterns, and I hope that this helps anyone who is motivated enough to actually use it. The spreadsheet is functional, but I never said it would be fun.

Whether you use a spreadsheet or an abacus, tracking spending is not up there on the list of activities that people enjoy. But the discipline to use it is sold separately. For someone like me who’s hacked their life that it’s effectively 99.9 percent cashless, the transaction records might allow you put off entering the expenses for a while…but if you procrastinate for too long, it is certain to get messy. It all needs to go in there, as soon as possible, especially if you spend cash. That’s the part that I cannot quite automate yet even if I could code because the gatekeepers will not cooperate (more about that later). Like every single kobo/shilling/cent/penny. Of course, the tracker is useless if you don’t actually track the expenses. Or you can contract your allowance to make room for that thing you really want to buy.Īlmost done! Just making a few instruction notes… /zpobreltE3

So once your raise gets approved, you can responsibly reward yourself with a little more spending room without being afraid that your expenditure will rush to catch up to your income. Changing the limit is as simple as overwriting one cell with the new number. The actual work took like ten minutes, but the resulting sheet allows me set spending limits for broad expense categories and gives me visual feedback if I’m going over budget in any category. I added some conditional formatting to some cells with simple arithmetic functions. And without really doing a lot, I can see the things that burn holes in my pocket the most frequently.īut then I got the idea to make the sheet give dynamic visual feedback about the numbers I was looking at.

The basic idea was a spreadsheet that I could stick my expenses in, you know, to see what was going on. I finally created a personal expense tracking spreadsheet that I might actually use.

Daily spending tracker excel