Hiya,
I just realized that when I update my budget in the Savings Budget sheet, it not only re-writes my category sheet’s budget for that particular month - the following month’s budgets for that category are also updated to reflect the updated month’s budget.
Is there a way to get that to stop happening? My intention in updating my budget in the Savings Budget sheet is only to change the budget for that month - not all in the future.
And, can I safely reverse what I’ve done by reverting back to a previous version of my category sheet? I had everything nicely plotted when I first created the sheet in mid-January, but now it’s all out of balance.
Hi @kjlawless,
A couple of responses to your questions, hope this helps:
The categories sheet is set up so that in the budget, each cell is equal to the cell to its left. If you select a cell (other than the first month) you should be able to see the formula. I’m guessing that this is why your changes propagated to future months. You can stop this from happening by overwriting those cells so that they’re just numbers instead of formulas. I think that should fix it. If you want an easy way to see which cells in your budget are formulas vs which you’ve overridden with numbers, this is a good solution using conditional formatting:Using a custom format to show manual budget items
You may be able to using google sheets version history to get an old version of your categories sheet. Look for the bit of clickable text to the right of the menu bar at the top of the page that says something like “Last edit was two minutes ago”. Click on that and you will be able to see your version history of the sheet. I wouldn’t recommend reverting the whole sheet, since that rolls back your transactions sheet also and could cause other problems. But you should be able to see your categories sheet and copy and paste the budget from an old version into your current sheet.
One more thing to note is that when you update your budget from the Savings Budget sheet, all that does is change the numbers in the Categories sheet. Personally, I prefer to just enter the values in the Categories sheet directly. That also makes it easier to see if any future months are affected.
As @matt notes, once you overwrite the standard formula-driven cells as values in your Categories sheet, Savings-Budget-driven changes to monthly budgets won’t affect future months.
Regarding your second question, I recommend using the version history tool in Sheets to restore a copy of your old Categories sheet. You can manually move the contents of this old sheet into your current spreadsheet (with all the latest transactions & categorization) to restore what is needed.
Thanks, @matt and @randy! This was really helpful. I ended up ‘hard coding’ all the numbers in my category sheet for the months ahead after saving a copy of my original version of the category sheet.
Cheers!
Kate