How to Use Excel to Manage Your Home Budget
One reason people run into money trouble is that they fail to budget and track their funds properly. This is not necessarily intentional; rather, it may simply be a matter of not being organized well enough. Using Excel, Microsoft’s spreadsheet application, can help you get your household budget under control. This program gives you a central place where you can quickly see your spending history and analyze your financial situation. The program works even for complex budgets and is user friendly, requiring only basic data entry skills. Also you can hire experts by creating a request ‘do my homework’ or ‘do my excel project’ on this website.
Instructions
- 1
Gather all of your bills for fixed expenditures such as food, rent and electricity from the past six months. Find the average amount you paid for each fixed expenditure. Use these figures as estimates for what you should allot for fixed expenditures in your budget. If you don’t have bills or receipts for some of these expenditures, you can get figures through your bank and credit card statements.
- 2
Assess how many times you get paid per month and what the amount is for each paycheck. Use these figures to estimate your monthly income. Do not count funds like tax refunds or work bonuses in your income, as these funds are not predictable enough to be listed in a budget. You can track these in a separate sheet in the Excel workbook if you like.
- 3
Divide your fixed and variable expenditures into separate categories, such as food, savings and entertainment.
- 4
Open a new Excel document. By default, Excel usually shows three sheets in one document, and you can add new sheets by clicking the “Insert Worksheet” button. In the first sheet, put all of your fixed expenditures. Put your variable expenditures in the second sheet and your income in the third. Highlight the column in which you’ve placed your dollar figures and use the “Sum” button to get a total for each sheet. If desired, you can have all this data in one sheet. You’ll simply need to use more columns to the right.
- 5
Create new sheets for each of the categories you created in Step 3. You can rename sheets according to the categories by clicking the sheet tabs, right clicking and choosing “Rename.”
- 6
In each category sheet, use the leftmost column for the date of your transactions. Use the next right column for a description of the expenses or income. To the right of this, list the dollar figure for the transaction. Always start the third column with the monthly allotment for that category. Type any expenditures with a minus sign so Excel will recognize those as subtractions. Highlight the dollar figure column and use the “Sum” button to see how much you have left in the monthly allotment. Do this for every sheet you create.
- 7
Save your work on your computer or a flash drive. It’s a good idea to save the budget document in at least two locations — that is, separate drives — in case one drive or computer stops working.
Tips & Warnings
- Add expenditures and income additions to your sheets as soon as they happen so you don’t get overwhelmed with data entry later. A good method is to set aside some time each weekend to catch up on entering transactions.
- Highlighting can make tracking particular expenses (e.g., baby formula) within sheets easier.
- If creating a budget document from scratch is too overwhelming, you can try similar methods but use a predesigned Excel budget template. These are available from Microsoft as well as other independent template sites.
