How many spreadsheets do you have?

I have a nightmare of work ones, so use it sparingly at home, (largely preferring notepad), but I've one of certain purchases which will save my Executor some fuss. Also some copies of work pay & various scout calendars.

I'm thinking a Christmas-&-birthday present & what's-in-the-freezer ones are eminently sensible - thank you for your wisdom! (I am also realising I could stop a lot of can I if I only did more & better what if! <blush>)

I should try to find a spreadsheet app that'll work on an iphone as well as a desktop.

I'm too old & untrusting of tech to put all my data eggs in one basket - several different sheets & only books by quarter.

Spreadsheet OCD here too. They tend to appear/disappear/merge/become obsolete. I've currently got active spreadsheets for household budget, garden planting & meds. All multi-tab, the latter being incredibly complicated after over three years of chemo. I'm on Excel for Mac 2011 and seem to have forgotten how to make really nice graphs...

I love a spreadsheet and have several - mostly multi-tabbed. I have a lot of hobbies and belong to a few groups (craft/book groups/WI) and always seem to end up doing some sort of admin. for them so it helps feed the habit. This time of year is when I start to plan next year's budget so I copy this year's planner and start a new one. I keep a running total of cash in and out which gets reconciled at least monthly, plus a monthly breakdown of spending with a column in setting expected budget. So I can tell at a glance that this year I have already blown the budget for hobbies, but fortunately haven't spent all of the expected vet. budget for the cat (only expense being flea and worming treatment so far). I also have a tab with all the family members who I buy presents for with their birthdays and an estimate of what I hope to spend. I use this to jot down ideas for presents if they mention something they would like or if I see something at a good price. I can look back to see what I bought them last Xmas to avoid repeating and also see how much I spend year on year.
Blimey - having written it down like that I am amazed I have any time left for hobbies but it is second nature to me so actually after the initial set-up keeping on top of things is very quick - probably no more than an hour a week. My friend spends much longer than this trying to work out what she has spent her money on and why she is overdrawn.

I have three active spreadsheets going at any given time: the grocery challenge spreadsheet, a cashbook for our family company and my personal budgeting spreadsheet.

Since I’ve got an iPhone, I track my grocery challenge spend in Numbers - the Apple equivalent of Excel - but everything else is kept in Excel. I started the grocery challenge before I got a Windows 365 account and refused to pay extra to be able to use Excel on the phone. Each month gets a new tab and I can update it on the go, say, if I’m purchasing stuff from market stalls, who don’t routinely issue receipts. Possibly, at some point, I’ll transfer it to Excel.

The company cashbook gets updated every time an invoice is paid or the payroll is run - we have virtually no other expenses - and, at the end of the company’s year, I create a new, blank version for the next financial year. The previous year’s cashbook is renamed and forms the account book for our corporation tax return and statutory accounts.

Re my Personal Budget, I update it each time I change jobs - I’m a contractor - or at the start of each new tax year or whenever my tax code changes, whenever there is a significant change to my take-home pay. Every time, I’ll make a new iteration of the budget page and relabel it with the year and month. It lists my take-home pay; our joint expenses and my contribution to the joint account to pay for them; my personal bills (mobile phone, audible); all my little savings pots; and, finally, my “money to live off”. Everything gets transferred out of my main bank account on payday, so whatever is left in there is my “money to live off”. (I have a “bills” account for the recurring personal bills.).

Whenever I open it after the start of a new calendar year, I’ll save it as another iteration with the new year in the name, however I won’t delete the old tabs. It’s great to be able to look back over previous years and see how much better/worse I’m doing or what’s changed since then.

- Pip

Fusspot wrote: »

This is interesting. I am thinking of creating different workbooks for different topics and then tabs for each year within the workbook. With the budget spreadsheet on its own I've always done that a workbook per year so I don't know whether to stick with that format. Is this how you do yours?

I actually use several formats depending on what he spreadsheet is for. "Hobby" ones are totally different to my personal ones. The main personal one though currently has 8 tabs on it -

1) cash in/out - I have several banks accounts + 2 credit cards
monthly spends - detailing what I spend my cash on
2) running annual sheet -detailing month by month spending in categories
3) renews - giving dates for stuff like insurance/car MOT etc. and what I spent last year
4) solar - I have solar panels so keep a tally of the readings and also include gas/electric readings in this
5) budget - a list of fixed expenses, plus what I allocate to each category (e.g. gifts/vet/hobbies etc.). Pretty much everything I spend on is on here and then broken down into a monthly amount. It includes the birthday list and Xmas ideas
6) meal planning - I plan (roughly) for the month and base my shopping on it
7) kitchen - I have been planning some work in the kitchen and costing various permutations out
8) 2020 - this is where I use the figures from this year to start to allocate a budget for next year. For example I spent a bit more on "house purchases" as well as "hobbies" this year than planned so I can think whether these categories need to be increased or if I need to rein my spending in. I usually estimate a rise in fixed expenses of around 10% each year. Fortunately it is usually much less than this but I would rather err on the side of caution.

Each year's spreadsheet is saved onto a usb stick as well as being archived on my computer, and also backed up each month. It does look like it takes a lot of time but I am so used to it that it really doesn't. I am retired now on a company pension (no state pension for another 2 years) so need to manage my money carefully, but when I worked I used spreadsheets all the time so as I said before it is second nature to me. Some friends think I am obsessed with money but I think the opposite is true. I look at it once a week and that's it, and I like the fact that all my living expenses are covered without having to scrabble around to pay the credit card bill and car tax, or forgetting someone's birthday. Plus I do allocate a monthly "mad money" amount that I draw in cash and use if I go out for the day for a tea and cake, or a little treat.