The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: Zola. on November 28, 2017, 10:21:26 AM
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Does anyone here use Google Sheets or Excel to log all their expenses ...If so, what way do you present your data?
For me I have the following:
- A yearly review at the top - a bar chart showing total expenses compared month by month
- Below a month by month split of expenses - Broken down into - Investing, Fixed Debits (Mortgage, etc.), Mortgage Overpayment, Car Loan, Groceries & General Shopping, Fuel , Dining & Socialising, Takeaways, Furnishing, DIY, Housework etc, Misc Fund
- A pie chart beside these expenses showing their split along with percentages
What else can I do?
Do you approach it differently?
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I just use Personal Capital. Annoying to get the calls where they want to try and convince me to invest with them, but a lot nicer to have it track/categorize all my spending for me instead of me having to input/upload/etc data into a spreadsheet and sort it all.
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just use personal capital - its much easier use my link below and we get 20 bucks each!
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I use Google Sheets and love it.
Big picture, I have a sheet for each year and each month: 2017 Summary -- January 2017 -- February 2017 --etc.
On the yearly summary sheet, my rows are the months, and the columns are for the following data: Gross Income, Pre-Tax Savings, Net Income, Post-Tax Savings, Expenses, Net Difference, Savings Rate, Net Worth. I fill these in each month to give me a "big picture" flavor.
For each monthly sheet, I have six boxes that are kind of their own ecosystems: income, savings, expenses, assets, liabilities, and net worth. These boxes all have formulas so they auto-calculate and communicate with the other boxes.
I constantly tinker with this, so it's not perfect. I'd like to work in some things related to goals, but I'm still messing around with that.
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Nice one RSM - can you do a screenshot to see what way you work? With any sensitive info blurred out of course.. i am always lookogn at ways to make it more interesting.
I have no idea how to calculate net worth etc.
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e.g. heres my December fixed costs..
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This is the monthly setup for now. Still working on the discretionary expenses and how to categorize them.
(https://preview.ibb.co/jdbOcm/Spreadsheet.jpg) (https://ibb.co/b2MZiR)
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Very nice work! :)
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Very nice work! :)
Thanks. A really important thing for me with these is visualization.
The left side of the page is monthly and goes from the top down. It starts with what goes in (income) then what goes out (savings and expenses). The right side is a similar top-down visual display of the basic net worth calculation, assets minus liabilities.
Everything that can have a formula does. They are very easy in Google Sheets.
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We use Google sheets. I can't tell you how do the initial setup and what formulas are used, because my husband set it up, but we start a new sheet each month. We probably have more categories to track than most people want, but I really enjoy being able to check if we have enough money for our yearly car insurance renewal or HOA fees or how much we've saved for house maintenance.
I do need to start doing a yearly summary, I like that idea.
Each month has tabs for:
1) Funds - Monthly initial balances for savings "buckets", retirement accounts, bank accounts, credit cards, etc, total expenses from or additions to each fund, and current balance. There is also a column with total debts (cc balances and mortgage), total positives (savings, retirement, house value), total retirement account value, and net worth.
2) Budget - This has our expected income for the month (broken down into net pay, daycare reimbursement, and 401k contributions + employer match), and then a table with our monthly budget, total expected cost for each category, current spending in each category, current remaining before we're over budget. There's also some pie charts and bar graphs illustrating our spending/saving/income ratios. I budget down to "we put away $9 a month to renew Amazon prime" level, but I really like them all being distinctly funded expenses/"savings" categories.
3) Transactions - I input these manually, but I enjoy that 10 or 15 minutes every morning :) Date, origin (cc, bank account, savings account, income), destination (expenses, savings account, checking), description, total $ amount, and what budget category or fund it belongs to
4) Summary - This is just a summary of the balances of our checking account, credit cards, and ally account to make sure that we aren't missing any transactions. It also gives us an expected end of month value of whether we are going to be under or over budget.
All the tabs are linked, so transactions entered update our budget, summary, and fund overview automatically.
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Mine looks a lot like Zola's...I have the months in columns (plus one column for each month for notes), and a row for each type of expense: At the top are monthly expenses like mortgage, phone, etc., and at the bottom I have irregular expenses like vet visits, haircuts, business expenses, etc.
I allow a certain amount for food and for other "variable expenses," and I have a separate sheet for the variable expenses for each month, which is broken down into pretty much anything that doesn't have a fairly fixed cost: Food, business, travel, gas, home repairs, and "discretionary"—a catchall for random gifts, entertainment, etc.
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P2F. Thanks for this thread.
Been using Mint but intrigued by the idea of using Google Sheets. Part of the reason is that while Mint works mostly, it is just not reliable. And so many duplicate transactions, that it gets annoying. I have to pretty much go in and tweak it every week.
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P2F. Thanks for this thread.
Been using Mint but intrigued by the idea of using Google Sheets. Part of the reason is that while Mint works mostly, it is just not reliable. And so many duplicate transactions, that it gets annoying. I have to pretty much go in and tweak it every week.
That's a big part of why we switched. I had to re-categorize transactions all the time, and one of our credit cards would never link correctly so all of those transactions were missing. If you're willing to put in the work to set up a Sheet the way you want it, and take 10-15 minutes a day to update transactions, it's worth a try.
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P2F. Thanks for this thread.
Been using Mint but intrigued by the idea of using Google Sheets. Part of the reason is that while Mint works mostly, it is just not reliable. And so many duplicate transactions, that it gets annoying. I have to pretty much go in and tweak it every week.
That's a big part of why we switched. I had to re-categorize transactions all the time, and one of our credit cards would never link correctly so all of those transactions were missing. If you're willing to put in the work to set up a Sheet the way you want it, and take 10-15 minutes a day to update transactions, it's worth a try.
I find that my credit card (American Express) actually categorizes things pretty well, much better than Mint. When I'm updating Google Sheets, I have my credit card statement in one window and the Sheet in the other. It's pretty seamless.
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I agree with using personal capital. I used to track expenses on my own using excel, but it is much easier with personal capital.