Budget Spreadsheet - Opinions & Ideas

Consumerist

To keep it simple - withdrawals from an account should be entered on the account's spreadsheet. Day-to-day cash expenditure should be kept separately in an expenditure account. i.e. the balance on the expenditure sheet is the money you should have in your pocket (or down the back of the sofa).

Hope that makes sense.

pickleiamin

I think im confusing people here. I apologise.

If I withdraw cash, I place it on my spreadsheet just as that. I dont further break it down. If I use my debit card I place it on the spreadsheet.

What I want to do is put on my spreadsheet an ammount for commuting and cake. So when I check further down the month I can see how my accounts are looking and if I need to tweak any areas.

danothy

Maybe I'm a cynic, but experience has taught me that there's nothing simple about either money or spreadsheets.

I'm all for the track everything route when it comes to money so all the little things that can mount up and require constant correction are eliminated.

Consumerist

pickleiamin wrote: »

What I want to do is put on my spreadsheet an ammount for commuting and cake. So when I check further down the month I can see how my accounts are looking and if I need to tweak any areas.

If you pay for commuting by debit card then that should be entered into the account used for the transaction. If, on the other hand, you pay for commuting in cash then that should be debited from the expenditure account. The same goes for the cake.

When you withdraw cash from a bank account then that amount should be debited from the bank's account sheet and simultaneously credited to the expenditure account sheet.

Hope that makes sense.

xrjtg

If you're happy with your system then that's fine, but it seems like some of you might be going to a lot of effort to replicate accounting software that already exists. Gnucash (free and open source) does everything I've needed in terms of tracking money, and there are others: I think MS Money is now free, for instance.

As I said though, if you have a system that works, stick with it!

pickleiamin

Consumerist wrote: »

If you pay for commuting by debit card then that should be entered into the account used for the transaction. If, on the other hand, you pay for commuting in cash then that should be debited from the expenditure account. The same goes for the cake.

When you withdraw cash from a bank account then that amount should be debited from the bank's account sheet and simultaneously credited to the expenditure account sheet.

Hope that makes sense.

That does make sense, however youre failing to see what else I have said above that, OR, Im confusing you.

If I withdraw cash or pay for somehing on my debit card its on the spreadsheet. Ok?

E.g I withdraw £10 and buy cake with it. All I put on my spreadsheet is £10 taken out under the "cash withdraws" heading. I dont note down 80p for cake and tea etc.

Now. On my spreadsheet I have future transactions i.e DD, CC payments etc. So two, three weeks down the month I can see how my account is looking.

I wanted to put down future "Possible" payments on my spreadsheet so I can see how my account looks and to make sure I can afford them.

My train is £2.65 a day. Now, thats if I go in on the train. So, I was wondering what is the best way of putting this into my spreadsheet. If I go on the train I usually get either cash out or pay by debit card. But, unless that happens, how do I put it into my spreadsheet? Thats what I was wanting to know.

xrjtg

You could have a transaction for £2.65 from Cash to Travel, for example, which is what I do when I want to record something I paid for in cash. Of course, this might not work with your setup.

EDIT: Oops: this doesn't address your actual question, which was about possible future transactions. Perhaps you could set your sheet to show the worst case, then delete transactions if they turn out not to take place?

getmore4less

I think you have to go back to basics.

What is a budget?

It's a plan of how you plan to allocate income.

This requires catagories of spending and how much you want to spend on each catagory.

Catagories can be as deailed as you want.

You might allocate at the mars bars a year or just £100pm on food or 150pm on all household expenes.


Then you have where is your money thats the accounts management and tracking the money from income to catagory of spends to check you are on track.

It is better to seperate these requirements since they tend to be incompatable with the simple spreadsheet approach.

A single spend in tesco may be made by CC and then the CC is paid by DD from a current account.

So the tesco bill will have multiple catagories of spend on it but the money moves around a few accounts before it becomes a real spend.

An old copy of MS money(or quicken) is cheap and does all this for you,
also manages investements

Already has the tools to do multiple budgets and forcasts what ifs etc.

Not so much fun as doing your on spreadsheet but morethan enough to play with.

pickleiamin

xrjtg wrote: »

You could have a transaction for £2.65 from Cash to Travel, for example, which is what I do when I want to record something I paid for in cash. Of course, this might not work with your setup.

EDIT: Oops: this doesn't address your actual question, which was about possible future transactions. Perhaps you could set your sheet to show the worst case, then delete transactions if they turn out not to take place?

Thats what I am thinking XR. If I put these down and I have the "worse" case situation and I can delete them.

Ill see about Quicken or MS Money. Is there much difference?

racingsnake

It seems you are after a cash flow forecast as well as a monthly budget.

Dont forget that with spreadsheets as long as you set them up correctly they will be easy to use and totally automate things.

Have a sheet for each month for every area - this could be a lot of sheets!

This doesn't have to be a problem because you have a summary sheet as the 1st sheet. The summary sheet just contains links to data in the monthly pages (probably current balance or totals etc) To do this just select the cell on the summary page you want to use, press = then go to the desired worksheet and select the cell you want to see on the front page and hit return

Try and separate cash flow from "real" figures.

If you really want to combine them you would have to have a list of expected outgoings and their dates. Then use an if / then statement along with the ()DATE to only add transactions in the future and not the past.