I have many small and large purchases that deliver value over multiple months and don’t make sense to be budgeted in a single month. Eg: the Tiller annual subscription is charged once a year for say $80. The monthly expense is actually $6.67, but the transaction is $80 in 1 month. I don’t want to pad my budget for that category with $80. Is there an easy way to do amortization of transactions over X months with Google sheets?
Hi @vaki,
Have you checked out the Savings Budget sheet? It’s perfectly equipped to handle recurring expenses at intervals greater than one month.
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You could even use the new splitter, @vaki, to split the one-year subscription charge into 12 even parts then manually bump the dates to one-month periods (into the future).
Or, if this is of interest, going even further… you could create a Saved Split rule that can break any (annual) charge into 12 equal parts (though you would need to manually set the category and dates afterward).
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I spent some time playing around with the Savings Budget sheet, but I haven’t been able to wrap my head around using it for this. Can you explain how this would work in practice for a prepaid transaction? How exactly would I use the rollover savings and budgets to get a transaction in June to be amortized over the next 12 months?
My method would be a pre-purchase amortization i.e. for known upcoming expenses I budget x/n each month where x is the expense amount and n is the number of months from the current month through the expense month inclusive.
Randy’s solutions would work best for spreading an expense in the current month across multiple months into the future, which sounds like it is more what you are looking for.
I think I prefer my method for planned future expenses and Randy’s method for unexpected transactions that can have their budget shared across future months.