Created my own budget template...would anyone find it useful?

Hello! I wasn’t finding what I wanted so I created my own budget template with scripts and formulas. A couple of features:

  • It takes into consideration 2 paychecks per month occurring on any day as long as that day is valid, as that is how I am paid.
  • It dynamically adjusts the rows in the second and third tables to fit the amount of values in each and deletes extra rows
  • For Bills, it pulls from transactions to calculate the actual amount spent on bills for each pay period in the actuals column and splits the bill total in half to put in each cache column so I can save for each bill over the course of the month.
  • For the savings table, it calculates transactions tagged as specific savings categories and returns the amount allocated to each per pay period in the actuals column. in the Cache columns, you can manually enter the amount you plan to put towards savings and then compare it against the amount you were able to save.
  • For the summary, the Cache columns are manual entries and the actual columns are dynamic and update based on the month selected and amounts in the savings and bills breakdown table.
  • For all cache columns, you can save and load the data so you can store your manual entries and go back to them (or plan for the future).

Dependencies:

  • Transactions Sheet
  • Categories Sheet
  • Category Schedule Sheet (for creating and referencing unique tags)

Is this something people would be interested in using/testing/debugging with me? I can work on cleaning it up and sanitizing the data if so and am open to suggestions on how to improve it. Right now I just have a snapshot of how it looks and a description.

3 Likes

@jessa256 Good job Jessica. I can see why you would want this type of view to meet your monthly budget needs. It provides you at a glance where you are at with your monthly budget.

Hello, I would be happy to test if you’d like. I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. Great job! Sincerely,
Mic

Hi @m.svoboda09, I’d love some help testing it! I’m making a couple of updates to it (to show the actual transactions in the period from the sums) but I will mention/tag you once it is ready (hopefully tonight or tomorrow).

@m.svoboda09 - Hey, I have the sanitized version of the google sheets file. I don’t have this set to dynamically pull from the transactions sheet so It is important that the transactions sheet up until column H matches mine. I will see if I can fix that on this next round of edits.

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Hi and thanks.
I’m traveling for work but check weds after my trip.
Best
Mic

Updated the sanitized version (previous reply) so that the save and load functions work dynamically (they were broken before) and made a couple of improvements to make it work with a broader range of data/inputs.

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Thanks for sharing! My main budget focus is on saving and I haven’t found many templates that handle it well. This is great.