"Budget Plan" Tip - Creating New Budget Plan for New Year

Discussion
1

The Budget Plan template was designed to be ‘reusable’, so it can still be used if you change your Categories sheet to a new year. If you’d prefer to start clean with a new Budget Plan sheet, it’s relatively easy to do:

  1. Rename your Budget Plan sheet to something like “Budget Plan 2023”
  2. Install Budget Plan like you did the first time, either from the Community Solutions gallery in Google Sheets, or by copying the sheet from the shared template in Excel.
  3. Because your Category sheets formulas will be pointed to the old template, you need to redo them. Go to your “Categories” sheet and select cell E2, which should be just below your January heading in a default sheet (yours may differ if you made changes). Click into the formula bar, paste the following formula and press ENTER:

=IF(ISBLANK($A2),"",IFERROR(SUMIF('Budget Plan'!$E$4:$E$200,$A2,OFFSET('Budget Plan'!$L$4:$L$200,0,MATCH(DATEVALUE(E$1),'Budget Plan'!$M$3:$X$3,0))),0))

Note if you’re first month column (usually January) isn’t in column E, then change the ‘E’ in “DATEVALUE(E$1),” part of the formula to the letter of your first month column.

  1. To fill this into the rest of the cells, select cell E2 again, then grab the “fill handle” in the lower right corner of the cell, and drag to the right until you cover all the way to the right of the sheet. Let go, then grab the handle again and drag down until you get to the bottom of the sheet. That formula should now exist in all your cells, and they should all show $0.00 since you haven’t filled anything into the Budget Plan yet.

Note: If you create multiple Budget Plan sheets, you may want to ‘archive’ your old sheet(s) to reduce the processing load in your template.

5 Likes
3

Is there a way to use Budget Plan (which I love) without wiping out the prior year’s budget amounts?

4

The above instructions would help you retain that information, plus use it as a starting point on a new sheet. If you just want to keep everything the same, you can keep the same sheet, it will update to the new year when you update the date in your Categories sheet (editing the January cell on the Categories sheet to ‘1/1/2025’ will also update the Budget Plan period).

1 Like
5

Do you mean the amounts on the Categories sheet, which are formulas pointed to Budget Plan? If so, since prior year budgets are not being changed, I highlight and Copy the amounts, then Paste Special > Values Only.

This only applies if you’re keeping multiple years of budget amounts on the Categories sheet as described in this article, and using Budget Plan:

Multi-year Budgeting in the Tiller Foundation Template