Spreading Spreadsheet

I haven’t forgotten about my updated finance tracking/planning system. Unfortunately, as I’m working on it, I keep finding bugs and improvements that I want to make.

I did manage to get the tracking and budget pages put together for the whole year. Unfortunately, I forgot a couple of new categories and as I’m inserting those I am finding some bugs. Fortunately, I’m finding those bugs now instead of after I’ve started using the system.

It does seem that in order to meet my goals of “easy to use take little time, and provide a lot of useful output” I have to make it rather complicated behind-the-scenes. More than the planned 13 pages, but much less scrolling on each page.

Current pages & their features:

  • Financial Life on One Page
    • shows accounts and status of emergency funds
  • Averages
    • pulls actual spending for each month for each category
    • shows average over a year’s time, so that can easily make budget
  • Fixed
    • list monthly fixed expenses in one place, pulled to tracking/budgeting pages
    • list monthly fixed payments and dates in one place, pulled to tracking/budgeting pages
    • can list annual amount and have monthly amount calculated
  • Budget Page
    • one for each month
    • fills in last month’s numbers, so that don’t have to start from blank each month
    • pulls info from that month’s tracking page
    • compares budgeted amounts to actual spending
    • pulls fixed amounts so don’t have to enter in more than once
  • Tracking Page
    • one for each month
    • tracks multiple accounts on one page
    • pulls budget numbers, so can quickly compare
    • pulls any automatic payments and dates so don’t have to enter multiple times

Just wanted to let you know that I haven’t forgotten and am still putting it together. It might be more complicated than I initially planned, but it will be much easier to use and provide more useful results than my old system!

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