The report I mentioned is more of a projection of recurring expenses, broken into pay periods. Essentially, it uses my Income Settings Sheet to determine your pay date and frequency. You then select a date on the report, as well as how many “paycheck lanes” you want to generate (from 1 to 6). The report will generate all of the recurring expenses expected to be due within the given period, and place them under the paycheck that the expense will be due from. It also uses my Credit Card Settings Sheet to optionally pull in the totals due for each credit card, and maps them to the paycheck they will be due from as well. There’s a section at the top that aggregates the final totals of each period to give an overall total due/available.
Black entries are upcoming expenses that have yet to be paid, and shows the budgeted amount, which is used in the calculation to show what’s available. Green entries are expenses already paid, and shows the actual amount spent. When you mark a transaction as an expense in the new Expense Tag column on the Transactions sheet that the Generated Recurring Expenses Workflow introduces, the expense turns from black to green, and the budgeted amount is replaced with the actual amount of the transaction marked. The amount available is then updated. Red entries are expenses that have not been marked in the Transactions sheet, and the due date has passed. Blue entries are credit card totals due, and can be excluded by the control in cell W3. Additionally (for periods that are current or in the past), you can set the control in cell W4 to Yes to include all transactions not marked as expenses that occurred within that paycheck period, and they will show up in Italicized grey.
This allows you to project the available amount of money that you will have left per paycheck after all of your recurring expenses and credit card debt is covered. This, in turn, allows you to better plan for what you can stash back into savings, and also allows you to see where exactly your budget might be tight. So if you see that you have $400 projected to be available after covering all expenses this check, but only $100 available after the next check, it’s likely a good idea to cover one of the expenses due out of that check to free up some money in that next period. So instead of thinking “I have $400 to spend or save”, you can think “I should earmark some of this money for a future expense and keep my spend/save amount to about $250 instead so next week isn’t so tight.”