Home Expenses: Starter Edition - Personal Finance Spreadsheet

This spreadsheet will help you keep track of your regular monthly and yearly expenses.

For many of us our bills are automatically paid through recurring payments (Direct Debit in the UK, or ACH in the US) to service providers. It’s very easy to lose track of all the things we pay for, whether each month or for those one-off payments we make each year.

Just considering the many streaming services we may use – whether for TV, films, music or podcasts – can you remember which ones are pay-monthly subscriptions or annual payments? And what was the last price change increased to?

Would you like to be able to stay on top of your expenditure and understand where all your money is going?

Features

These features will help you manage your personal finances:

• Two data entry sheets for expenses (Per Month and Per Year), each providing 18 tables separated by category (Housing, Taxes, Insurance etc).
• Two data entry sheets for income (Per Month and Per Year), each providing a single summary table.
• Four report sheets, providing summaries and breakdowns of your income and expenses via tables and graphs.
• An overview sheet, providing an at-a-glance summary of your Total Income, Total Expenses and Remainder over one year.

View Your Expense Report Sheets

The provided report sheets are summarised below.

‘Report - Expenses Per Month’ and ‘Report - Expenses Per Year’

• View a consolidated table of all expenses (taken from all 18 payment category data entry tables) sorted in ascending order.
• Additional tables break down expenses by sub-groupings of category (Housing, Taxes etc) and type (Credit Card, Debit Card etc).
• Graphs summarise these tables in descending cost order.

’Annual Report - All Expenses’

• View a consolidated table of all expenses (taken from all Per Month and Per Year payment category data entry tables) sorted in ascending order.
• Additional tables break down expenses by sub-groupings of category, type and repeat interval (Per Month or Per Year).
• Graphs summarise these tables in descending cost order.

‘Annual Report - By Month’

• View tables summarising your January to December income and expenses across a single year.
• View a cash flow table that indicates what you are left with each month.
• Graphs to visualise these tables.

Understand Your Expenses

By examining the report sheets you’ll be able to understand things such as:

• The total amount being spent on various payment categories such as Transportation, Food & Drink or Entertainment.
• The total amount being spent on various payment types such as Cash, Debit Card, Credit Card or recurring payments (Direct Debit in UK, or ACH in US).
• Which months have the most or least amount of expenses.

Consequently, you’ll discover:

• What most of your money is being spent on.
• Where you can cut back to make the most impact to your savings.
• Forgotten about but costly services that you could consider cancelling.
• When in the year you’ll need to keep back savings to pay for several costly expenses that all occur at the same time.

Included Files

A zipped file (.zip) containing four copies of the spreadsheet (.xlsx) and a Readme (.txt) file.

• Two copies of the spreadsheet are for US users.
• The other two copies of the spreadsheet are for UK users.
• For both pairs of spreadsheet files there is one spreadsheet with example data and the other with no data.

(I’d recommend making copies of these original files before working on them. That way you can always go back to the originals at any point in the future)

Requirements

This spreadsheet was designed in Microsoft Excel, so you’ll need access to a computer (Windows or Mac) and a locally installed recent version of Excel (one that supports use of the Power Query, Pivot Table and other utilised features i.e. Excel 2021 or newer).

If you have a Microsoft 365 Subscription, you will have access to the most recent version of Microsoft Excel which is fully compatible with this spreadsheet on Microsoft Windows or Apple macOS.

Please note: The free web versions of Microsoft Excel do not support the Power Query feature, hence that version will not work correctly with this spreadsheet.