What is the goal of your workflow? What problem does it solve, or how does it help you?
Despite being a lover of spreadsheets, I don’t always want to look at a wall of numbers. So, I wanted to provide a visual and interactive way for me to stay on top of my finances. I focused on a few key goals:
Track the growth of my net worth
Track my cash flow by looking at my income and expenses
How did you come up with the idea for your workflow?
It was a multi-week process with many tweaks and adjustments. I wanted a visual dashboard that has all the key metrics. And I wanted it all on 1 tab so I can easily view it on my mobile device as well.
Please describe your workflow. What are the sheets? Does it use any custom scripts or formulas?
All the charts and numbers are powered by a set of pivot tables in a separate tab. There a number of custom formulas such as ones to help show the Budget Pace chart. You’ll find VLOOKUPs, SUMIFs, SPARKLINEs, and IF statements.
And since the data is based on pivot tables, you can easily double click on a pivot table cell to quickly drill down into those transactions.
Anything else you’d like people to know?
You can even use the +/- to expand on the budget categories on the dashboard! See it in action here (gif image).
Is it ok for others to copy, use, and modify your workflow?
Of course! You probably want to customize your categories but it should be pretty extendible.
**If you said yes above, please make a copy of your workflow and share the copy’s URL: Financial Trends Template
Thanks for the votes so far!! Since I am actively using this spreadsheet myself, if you have any suggestions or ideas, please share them with me! I love to see what more I can do with the file.
Great job on this sheet! Thinking about pulling it into a different sheet. It looks pretty modular, so I assume I can just take the “Overview” Worksheet along with the “Pivots” Worksheet and it should work just fine? I’ll give it a shot and report back if I have issues.
Great ! Was looking for some nice Cashflow charts. Unfortunately coping didn’t work that great so I had to basically recreate the Pivot table and Overview tabs but at least i could reference your pivot formulas. I skipped the hidden tabs as I don’t do budgeting.
The MoM equations didn’t seem to reflect reality when negative numbers were involved…so I changed it to be =if(isblank(S1),0,(S4-R4)/ABS(R4))after reading this: https://www.excelcampus.com/functions/percentage-change-formula-negative-numbers/
That should work! And I have revised the template a bit too. Once I am able to anonymize the file, I can share the new template which is even easier to accommodate.
