🏆 Budget Plan - Google Sheets

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Wow, @jpfieber! You’ve been hard at work. This is super cool.

I built the Budget Builder to do something similar for my own budget a few years ago and I love how far you’ve gone from there. It’s really easy to use.

Some ideas and feedback with no need to implement… just first impressions:

  • Do your “Frequency” options include a way to spread a cost over the provided period? For example, what if I’m doing a $20k bathroom remodel April through July? Is there a way to spread those dollars across those months?
  • Your frequency options are SUPER POWERFUL… but the words aren’t super intuitive. I don’t have any great ideas, but there may be different words that require less referencing of the documentation (which is great btw).
  • Is the idea on Changeability that it isn’t so much a dollar amount as a power ranking combining both magnitude of change * ease of change? I wonder if formatting as dollars confuses this concept? Would it be easier to understand if it were just a unitless magnitude?
  • I’d consider freezing horizontally up to column B (at least).
  • I’d consider a 2-axis lookup (for the months) on your category formula to address an issue where the date order in Categories doesn’t match up with the date order in Budget Plan (e.g. Budget Plan starts in February). I think the formula would look something like this:
    =IF(ISBLANK($A2),"",iferror(SUMIF('Budget Plan'!$E$4:$E$200,$A2,offset('Budget Plan'!$K$4:$K$200,0,match(F$1,'Budget Plan'!$L$3:$W$3,0))),0))
  • Consider adding a version number so people users can keep track of your changes— maybe just static text in K1.
  • The note in L3 should change from d/m/yy to m/d/yy.
  • I’m a huge fan of Google’s checkboxes in A4:A… but I imagine maybe you are trying to harmonize the interface with your Excel version.
  • I think your tool may accommodate non-month-aligned periods but, as a budgeting tool, that flexibility will likely break down downstream as the data works its way through Categories then into the existing budget dashboards.

I really love this. Will use it personally.

You are doing an incredible job taking so many workflows to the next level with intuitive and powerful improvements, @jpfieber! :trophy:

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